The company that I worked for was a boutique musical equipment manufacturer. I'd worked my way up from an electronics technician to the artist relations manager. By developing and nurturing relationships with A-List musicians, it is possible to drive traffic to brick & mortar shops as well as eCommerce platforms.

An artist that I'd been working with for the better part of a year and whom I personally admired, was running into some technical difficulties during live performances. Due to a highly choreographed and digitally-synced setlist, it was impossible as a guitarist to engage every piece of gear he was running his signal through when there were only fractions of a second to accomplish this in. I had dealt with this issue before by suggesting that a tech handle some of the workload, but every band and every performance is different. This simply wasn't possible due to the tech being as busy as the performer was!

To enable the artist to focus on creative self-expression without the tools getting in the way. Simple enough, right? 😉

I've been enamored with music my entire life. Yes, I'm also very much a gear head. As such, I remembered reading an article about a massive synthesizer manufacturer allowing their ladder filter circuits to be used in the guitars from a very well-respected name brand guitar manufacturer in the late 1970's. Hmmm....

This led me down the path of thinking:

Our artist was getting his very own signature series instrument at the time, so there was a veritable blank canvas to work with and we could also capitalize on the advertising that came along with such accolades.

I had his tech send my team (consisting of two electronics engineers, one marketing person, and myself) a factory-stock example of this instrument. At this point, I was building a rapport with the VP of Product from the manufacturer of the guitar - which presented a nice cross-promotional opportunity for the both of our companies.

Back in 2008, there weren't many alternatives to Photoshop, which is what I used to create the above mockup for the artist to sign off on for the placement of some switches and the functionality of the guitar knobs. It isn't pretty, but it worked.

We wanted him to be able to engage/disengage the effect circuits by using his hands, so that required push/pull potentiometers for the instrument and he wanted to have them in the same location with the same functionality as the original knobs. After a little bit of experimenting, I came up with a clever way to incorporate this into the instrument and gave the diagram to my electronics engineers to prove the concept:

Anytime one is dealing with electronics that will be amplified, RF interference can be a real issue.

Thankfully, there was already enough space in the electronics cavity of the instrument that only minimal routing was needed. The techs were able to wire up the circuits and drop them in the instrument with no problems.

After the testing came back with positive results, we sent the prototype to the artist and he absolutely loved his new found freedom. The team had provided a solution and we created something extremely rare in business: a win/win situation for everyone involved.

By tackling a problem for a longtime product user and endorser we were able to yield some really interesting results: