Technical Support For Musicians

About me and Fearsome Sound

I have operated Fearsome Sound for several years informally and I established a web identity in 2009. I started playing drums and guitar as a pre-teen and developed into a competent gigging musician in my early teens playing in bands like  The Music Machine (with Pat Travers and Barry Wanless). During the eighties, I played in the Ottawa-based New Wave band “Gordie Uranus and The Universe”. We received some local radio airplay for a recording we did on Seed Records called “Fear Of The Night” flipside "It's Only Urgent". I guess that’s where “Fearsome” comes from. Ex Universe bandmate Andrew Dixon (Andy Terra - for those who remenber the Universe) and Bob Webber recently published a new song. Check out "Your Sisters Will (Fight to Survive)" on YouTube. In the 90's Barry Wanless and I put The Clamdiggers together - doing mostly Little Feat tunes. Barry is still living the dream with Feat First. Anyway, I have always been interested in the technology of music more than the art itself and this interest drove me to study electronics and mechanical engineering technology as a college student. I have been a certified engineering technologist since 1984. Fearsome Sound is fundamentally a hobby. That’s why I’m picky about the repair work I take on. I prefer to work on point-to-point vacuum tube circuits. I will take on older solid state circuits as well but I try to stay away from DSP and other modeling circuits simply because I’m not set up to properly deal with surface mount electronics. The repair work I do at Fearsome Sound helps me to further one of my technical passions – the creation of my own music-electronic devices. When I was a young musician, the most sought after sound was the sound of a guitar played through a dimed HIWATT or Marshall amplifier. Pete Townsend (The Who) was passionate about that sound too and he drove the amplifier manufacturers of his day to build the amps that made the sound he wanted – he had it right! Technically, it’s described as the symmetrical waveform distortion generated by a heavily over-driven push-pull vacuum tube output stage. It comes at a steep price; volumes high enough to make your ears bleed. Today most stage setups are multi-microphone systems processed through a large Public Address system with results quite similar to the fidelity of home stereo systems. The sound stage of today does not support nor require such a loud wash of sound across the stage so amp development has moved toward emulation of power tube distortion at lower volume. Most current designs incorporate cascaded preamp stages, master volume controls, transistor clipping circuits – or some combination of these things in their topology. At a macro level, results come in two general flavours - asymmetrical pre-amp tube distortion and hard edged, symmetrical, transistor based, clipping distortion. While asymmetrical distortion has some appeal, most players are generating their tone using symmetrical distortion generated by small transistor loaded stomp boxes.  The sound is hard-edged. We have learned to accept it. In fact, some genres of modern music are centered on that hard-edged distortion. My work to date has been concentrated on developing a vacuum tube (pre-amp) based, push-pull power tube (symmetrical) distortion emulator that can be packaged in a musical instrument amplifier or a stomp box. I have succeeded in this design goal. The stomp box is available now. The amp is on the way. Further detail about both devices is available on the Products page.

If you find yourself interested in what I’m doing – please contact me.

Fearsome Sound

Steve Peacock, C.E.T.

Copyright © 2009 Fearsome Sound