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sessed with his own effect designs, the first of which was the Warped Vinyl — a vibrato/chorus designed to simulate the effect of a warped vinyl record. “I just wanted to hear the sound that I had in my head! I ended up releasing the first version of Warped Vinyl in December of 2013,” says Korte. “I didn’t know, I wanted to sell some and I don’t think I was ever super unrealistic about it. At the time I knew that wasn’t going to be my only source of income or any source of income for a long time. Maybe I thought it would happen a little quicker and that I would get some income from it, you know? Because you just have to reinvest everything. But around that time, I ended up getting another engineering job for this other company which I worked at for about a year. It was a temporary position so I thought it would be right, because then I would work on my stuff on the side and then once my contract came up then I could reassess.” The Warped Vinyl was a hit right out of the gate. In fact, most of the company’s releases since the Warped Vinyl have all been successful — the Wombtone phaser, Gravitas tremolo, Spectre flanger and Tonal Recall delay. “What’s kind of amazing to
me though is that even with all the stuff that’s gone really well it’s still really hard to just start a business,” says Korte. “Even when pretty much everything goes right, it’s still so fragile at the beginning stages. And finally it’s starting to feel, it’s been a little over two months since we released Tonal Recall and that’s by far our most popular product. Since that has happened, we’ve been able to move here and (co-worker) Zack (Warpinski) is coming up on his one year anniversary and (coworker) Holly has been here officially since April, she was working a little bit as an independent contractor since February 2016. Ever since then it feels like a real company and now we have this space, we’re not in my basement.” There is a circuit board that is universal for all of the Chase Bliss pedals to date. It acts as the digital brain. Another board is placed on top of that one — the analog effect. The boards are all surface mount, and Korte knew he could not afford the equipment required to build those in-house. When the brain design was ready, he got a loan from his dad and build 250 of the motherboards with a local contractor in Minnesota. Today, the motherboards are built in California. For the effect boards, the
Chase Bliss Audio
Wombtone and Spectre are done in Minnesota, while another contract manufacturer does the Warped Vinyl, Gravitas and Tonal Recall. “We get everything here and do the testing and calibration,” explains Korte. “For Tonal Recall there are all sorts of trem pots in there we have to carefully set everyone and we have to go through this big process, it’s sort of awful but Zack does the majority of that. I’m doing a little bit right now because we are behind a little bit. Zack does a lot of the technical stuff. Holly does a lot of it as well though. We all kind of wear a lot of hats. It’s great because there’s a big part of it we don’t have to worry about.” Following the Tonal Recall, Korte admits he was exhausted. It was a difficult birth, leaving him a bit of a zombie. The company showed a small midi controller at Summer NAMM, but a lot of folks are curious about what might be next on the company’s development schedule. Could a reverb be in the queue? “I kind of painted myself in a corner with this digital brain, analog heart thing,” admits Korte. “I don’t think, at least with the layout and the size of the box that I have I can’t. I think it would be pretty difficult to do an analog reverb.” G
GEARPHORIA SAM ASH/NAMM
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