MAY I TAKE CONTROL NOW

Sonic, Squared:

Jasper's Juliet CollectiveDale Short

The note from the electric guitar goes around, and around, and around, through a hidden assembly of electronic circuits inside a round vinyl box called a "Circadia," with the face of a mysterious blond young woman on its cover label. Between the guitar and the amplifier the note is transformed into a sound like a mix between a drop of water and a tuning fork, the kind of vibrating purity that music can have in your dreams.

Plug in a different special-effects box--appropriately named the "Rainbow Crash" model--and the soothing dream turns nightmarish; the pedal's catalog description uses terms like "gnarly" and "boisterous," and even a promise that it will "beat the hell out of your amp's input stage."

The only thing the two vastly different sonic effects have in common is that the devices are both manufactured, as are an array of others, inside workspace along Jasper's Industrial Drive: the Bevill State Business Incubator Center. Created in 1990 with grants from the Appalachian Regional Commission and the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Center is named for the late Congressman Tom Bevill.

The manufacturing company's name is The Juliet Collective, and on this day its entire assembly line consists of CEO Robbie Spears and his colleague Britt Gardner, working across from each other at a table covered with circuit boards and soldering guns.

Spears' now-incubating brainchild came about through an unlikely set of circumstances: a love of guitars, a love of electronics, and the near-fatal crash of a friend's Windstar van in the year 2000, the day after his high school graduation.

"I was asleep in the back seat," he recalls. "When I woke up we had capsized, and my neck was broken. I couldn't move my arms." He was bedridden for months with a cervical collar brace (Halo), and was no longer able to play his guitar.

By trial and error he determined that his hands had just enough dexterity to arrange electronic components on a circuit board. So he spent his graduation-gift cash at Radio Shack and set about building his assembly skills: "Soldering became, in effect, my occupational therapy."

By the time the anniversary of his crash rolled around, Spears had gradually relearned guitar and started touring with a Christian rock band. Along with his newfound appreciation for free movement came a new perspective on the electronic special-effect devices that working musicians are so fond of.

He started custom building some of his ideas for musician friends, and one of them asked him to paint his name on the finished product. As an inside joke he signed it "Juliet"--not from Shakespeare's Romeo-and, but referring to an odd lyric he routinely shouted onstage during an original song his band played.

Thus the Juliet Collective was born: selling specialty products via the Internet direct to serious musicians as far away as Sweden and Japan.

The industry's first special-effect pedal, commonly known as the "wah-wah," was introduced in 1948. But in the 1960s, when bulky traditional vacuum tubes could be replaced with tiny transistors, the field of instrument-modifying took off in countless new directions.

"A company like Juliet is technically known, these days, as a 'boutique shop,'" says Spears, "because we make specialized items in limited quantities. But I've never liked the word 'boutique' because it has kind of a pretentious feel to it, and that's not what we're about, at all.

"Probably half the people doing boutique stuff don't actually know electrical engineering; they're just taking schematics off the Internet and putting an existing product like a Tube Screamer into a different kind of box and calling it their own, and that seems dishonest to me. We don't do clones."

An art poster on their office wall boils down the mission: "Musician-Built Guitar Stuff. Round Peg, Square Hole."

The most obvious quality that separates Juliet's products from the crowd--even to someone who's not a musician--is their outward appearance. On one side of the company's office floor is a metal grid arrayed with test samples of effects-pedal boxes, mostly from other manufacturers. Their designs tend toward the squarish, monochrome sameness of a shelf of random automobile parts.

One box breaks the monotony, big-time: The Juliet brand's circular vinyl cover is a four-color, art-quality design, featuring the face of an attractive and mysterious young woman--unofficially known as part of the "hot chicks series." The anonymous women are not chosen for eye-candy value, Spears says: "They're beautiful people inside and out. One is my girlfriend, another is a longtime friend, and another is the sister of one of my best friends. If we knew a girl who was beautiful but had a bad attitude, you sure wouldn't see her on one of our products."

As for the boxes' internal qualities, a review in Premier Guitar magazine said the company "embodies the boundlessly imaginative, renegade spirit of pioneers Electro-Harmonix and Morley..."

A detailed rundown by an on-staff tester of Juliet's "Circadia" model (Spears' first release) includes this observation: "Slow, odd-meter tempos create cool, wah-like swells ideal for rhythmically oriented ambient work or slower soul and blues tunesand they can also inspire cool counterpoints to a vocal melody, or even a whole drum part. "For the latter reason, control freaks may have a hard time with the Circadia. It often does seem to have a mind of its own. And it may, at times, ask you to play to what its doing instead of the other way around.

"But jamming away in my rehearsal space with a drummer, a syncopated rhythm played off a simple funk rhythm became a whole new groove, mood, and song. In this way, the Circadia has the potential to be one of those magic bullets when youre in a compositional rut. It may not have the answer you were looking for, but it can lead you down paths you may not have known to exist."

"Yeah, it was great to get such a good review for our strangest pedal," Spears says, "because I think for some of our more bread-and-butter products like Orange Cream we don't have to take 45 minutes to explain what it does. It's a distortion. It's our own distortion, it's unique. It's parallel, but still it's more grounded in something a new customer can understand without having to know a lot about us to start with."

Juliet is also in the process of exploring a different path: a new line of products for the mid-range price market. "Our premium line isn't cheap," says Spears. "Some models are close to $300. But it's not because we're trying to prove, 'Hey, we've got an expensive pedal.' It was an experiment to spare no expense and make the best possible product, period.

"With our new Candy Shop line, we're tethering back down a little bit. People have to learn to trust you before they can throw down $300. So this new line is about half the price, but the products have the same spirit. And that's a challenge, but I can apply what I've learned from doing the premium line, so ideally these can roll out a little more consistently.

"Our whole heart is in trying to bring back the notion of craftsmanship, of people talking personal pride in the things they manufacture." www.thejulietcollective.com

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(Dale Short is a native of Walker County. His weekly radio program "Music from Home" airs each Sunday at 6 pm on Oldies 101.5 FM, streams live online at www.oldies1015fm.com, and is archived afterward at www.carrolldaleshort.com)