29 Pedals slings some of the world's highest-quality, most alternative, and deeply mystifying effects. Such pedals, from the EUNA to the OAMP to the FLWR, have garnered a devout following of musicians, engineers, and audiophiles alike chasing highly artistic, musical, and utility-forward devices – but of course, there's plenty of questions to be had about 29 Pedals and their intriguing designs.
We sat down with Jesse Honig of 29 Pedals and Believable Audio for a chat all about his pedals, small gear stores, DIY recording, his dream of assembling an "effect pedal Voltron," and constantly chasing moments.
Before any questions could be asked however, we couldn't help but get to talking about the City of Brotherly Love.
Jesse Honig: You know, I don't go back to Philly very often, but I have a real soft spot for it because it's where I fell in love with gear. I worked in the music business there for fifteen or sixteen years because I started pretty young. I know all the clubs there, or at least the ones that were there before I left. I think Philly has a great music scene. Even today, I kind of follow the music scene a little bit. I think it's one of the most underrated cities in the country. If I hadn't grown up there, I would move there.
Russo Music: Saying you fell in love with gear there, was there any specific piece of gear in Philly that first sparked that love for you?
Honig: There were lots of them, actually. What happened was I fell in love with music around eleven or twelve years old. My uncle gave me his old drum kit, which was a sixties Ludwig Club Date kit, but it was in really poor shape because it had been sitting in my grandparents' storage space under their house for twenty-five years, so I had to go to a music store to get it cherried up.
Little gear stores are so dear to my heart and dear to my own journey. That's where I fell in love with learning about different kinds of gear, learning to fix my own gear and do my own tech stuff. I have a real soft spot for those stores. We just used to make the rounds on the weekends. You know, if I still lived in a city that had four or five music stores, that's what I would still do.
I'm always grateful that there are guitar stores that want to carry my pedals because it's an excuse to go to these guitar stores. When we did the Russo Rumble event earlier in the year, I spent most of the event shopping. I'm such a true gear nerd in that way.
Surely the most prominent community question about 29 Pedals is, "What do they do?" or, "Why are they like that?" We'll get around to dealing with some of those questions a little more granularly, but for now, how do you navigate these questions from a community as discerning as effect pedals'?
Honig: I guess the way I try to explain it is my journey as a designer came very much from my own needs and my own wants and my own sounds. As a gear nerd who's been working as a repair tech for a long time, and then I worked for a few gear brands designing new gear, I found some holes in the market where there were things I wanted that didn't exist.
The story about EUNA is I used to work a lot as a front-of-house tech and as a recording engineer, those were my main jobs for many years. A lot of engineers know that having a buffer at the beginning of your board is a great idea because it solves a lot of problems that you may encounter. I encountered a lot of resistance when trying to get the great guitar players that I worked with to use them. A lot of them said, "This circuit just doesn't feel good."
Because it's a circuit that's essentially supposed to do nothing, people overlook it. Having had my hands inside a lot of vintage consoles restoring them, seeing the love and attention that people paid to even the parts of the circuit that aren't supposed to matter according to conventional wisdom, I just wanted to see if I could make something that did that job but sounded better and felt better and was able to please very discerning, high-end guitar players. After a while, we did that, and I'm very, very proud of it.
In our recent interview with Emily Hopkins, she put the EUNA among the top pedals she ever featured on her YouTube channel with her harp because she "(doesn't) plug into anything without it." Did you foresee this kind of utility for amplified instruments outside of electric guitars?
Honig: Yeah, because I've worked a lot with acoustic guitar players and with violin players and with a lot of people who end up putting contact mics on things. One of EUNA's features is that it's able to maintain high impedance at high frequency, so maintaining high impedance at a lower frequency is not super hard.
A friend of mine who works for my distributor was like, "Oh, you should meet Emily and Russ because they're doing cool stuff and I think they might like what you make." We were all fast friends. I've become very good friends with them over the years and they're incredibly supportive of what I do and I'm incredibly supportive of what they do. I was very pleased that it worked out that way because I did kind of imagine as I was designing it, that this would also be good for a lot of acoustic instruments, because those are other problems I've been asked to solve as an engineer.
Have you learned of any situations for the EUNA similar to Emily's and her harp's?
Honig: Violin players seem to like it a lot because it can save the contact mics from getting such a shrill bump in the high end when you start to lose response. I was very pleased when Henry Kaiser started to use one. I mean, he is a guitar player, but he's a very avant-garde, interesting musician who uses a lot of interesting sounds and interesting concepts in his work.
I haven't heard of that many horn players doing it, although there is one person I remember who emailed me about it and then tried it out and really liked it. I think the whole kind of “contact mic crew” would find it pleasant. I do a lot of experiments with my friends that I go to the studio with.
On average, a 29 Pedals pedal has about 2.5 switches and 1.5 knobs. What drove you to design 29 Pedals with more switches than dials?
Honig: I like the repeatability of toggles. I like having a few informed choices about gear settings. It was a conscious thing where I like things to be able to be preset or to have fewer choices – and I like the clean look of a toggle. You can make every setting on each individual pedal more repeatable. You also have the added benefit of less choice paralysis.
It's an inverse of a pot almost, where you get a range of control over one circuit versus your switches that pack multiple different circuits into one pedal.
Honig: Yeah, like the switches on the FLWR that are kind of confusing are basically gain shaping switches. So, what those do is basically just give you switch access to both of the places where you might put a gain switch. One switch changes how much gain the circuit makes, and the other switch changes how much gain the circuit uses. It can be kind of subtle, but also you find people who are really in love with the ability to change those kinds of things and fine-tune their sound.
What's something commonplace in professional studios that you think more DIY recording spaces could benefit from?
Honig: A traditionally-designed patch bay and good cable management. I think those are the only things that actually matter in a studio.
When you're in a small home studio, an eight-by-ten spare bedroom in somebody's house and they have acoustic panels all over the walls. I don't think they're actually doing for you what you think they're doing for you. I think also letting your space be quirky is a great way to achieve interesting sounding recordings. I think that people should spend less money on acoustic treatment and more money on a proper, well-designed patch bay. It will tell you a lot about routing signal flexibility and how to be a really great audio engineer.
Don't try to fight the quirkiness of your space. Let it have its mark on your recording, almost?
Honig: Yeah, totally. I think especially as you're learning and growing as an audio engineer, if all you've ever done is close mic things in a dead room, I don't think you'll develop a really cool style as an audio engineer. I don't think you'll develop a unique perspective or unique way of doing things, which would be the goal, right? I think making things in a dead room is one cool way to do it, but it's not the only cool way to do it.
I think also a lot of the classic studios where they made classic records had a lot less treatment than you might think. Learning to deal with it and learning to let the flaws of a space become a feature instead of a bug can make you a very powerful audio engineer.
Believable Audio's online store sells a throw pillow that reads, "Thinking components don't matter is as foolish as thinking they are magic." Can you speak more to this?
Honig: Yeah, this is like, my favorite topic because I love to talk about gear and I love to talk about the differences between different pieces of gear. I love the lore and I love the magic. I think the problem with the online discourse is often the end goal is to have some kind of "gotcha" moment, either one way or the other. Like, "Gotcha! Vintage transistors don't mean anything." Or, "Gotcha! Only vintage transistors sound good."
I don't think those kind of statements are true or even have any kind of merit. I love learning about the differences between different pieces of gear and I find no "gotcha" at the end of it.
I just always laugh at the conclusion that these people draw, that either components are magic or the components don't matter. The truth is so much in the middle, it is almost perfectly in the middle.
One of the things I find most interesting about the 29 Pedals is their "Whatever" power supply connection. What drove you to go for the "Whatever" AC or DC connection over a standard nine-volt center negative one like everyone else uses?
Honig: When I started to do what I do, I knew that I wanted to have something that had internal 15+/- rails. That's how a lot of pro audio gear works, and I was familiar with a lot of those circuits and I find some benefit in that beyond a unipolar voltage, they tend to be less noisy. So originally, I designed it with a “lunch box” power supply, like you would use to power an API Lunchbox. I took the design to my friend, and he was like, "It's got a what?"
Anything that is too specialized becomes a non-starter.
As I was designing this thing, I was like, "Well, I could make it take in wider voltages." Then I was having a conversation with Paul Wolfe and he was like, "Well, yeah, and if you do 'X, Y, Z,' you can also make it accept AC, and then you can use anything."
So, you add a few components and you spend a little extra money on the build and suddenly in a pinch, you can go and get the cable out of your printer and power your pedal. You know, it adds ten, fifteen bucks to the cost of building it, but who cares? To make something better, to make something cooler, who cares?
Have you experienced any changes in tone with using your printer's AC adaptor on a 29 Pedals pedal?
Honig: There's three linear regulators and one digital regulator inside each pedal. By the time the circuit sees the voltage, it has been smoothed out so that even the worst power from the outside should be able to work. I do my best to make them largely self-isolating. That was one of the goals. It can't change the sound of it at all.
You've collaborated with Old Blood Noise Endeavors on their Signal Blender Stereo pedal. What's another brand you might want to work with and what uniquely "Believable Audio" idea might you bring to the table?
Honig: There's a group of brands that I'm closer friends with, although the entire community is really friendly. A few of them have turned out to be closer friends of mine, like Chris Benson and I are close and John from Electronic Audio Experiments and I are close. I consider them to be really good buddies. We always shoot the shit when we're at trade shows, trying to find something to do together.
I would love to do more with the Old Blood guys. What I'm always looking for is like a way to sort of, "form Voltron," and combine ways of doing things. So like, what does Chris Benson do way better than I do? Then what could I bring to the table? So that it's not just a random collab, but it's something that actually combines our strengths.
I really admire John's designs because they are both very specific and very versatile. I don't love to do a lot of high-gain stuff. Whenever I think about doing a high gain pedal, I think about collaborating with John because I could throw some wacky ideas at him.
If you're building your effect pedal Voltron, who are the other people you'd wanna call on and come together as the big robot?
Honig: John from EAE, the whole Old Blood team, besides being really good at what they do and coming up with cool ideas, are some of the most fun and inspiring people to be around. Chris Benson, Ryan from Vongon is also a friend and we've talked about collaborating a lot.
If I was allowed to pick a fifth, I would say Brian Sours, who makes transformers, because he's one of the most brilliant people. When I walk into a room with Brian, I feel like I don't know shit about shit. I love hanging out with him for that reason, because I think it's very important to maintain a sense of humility as you try to become an expert in something. Brian helps me out with that aspect a lot.
You've been on record saying about your work with pedals, "Rather than chasing tone, I'm always chasing a moment." Can you speak more to that?
Honig: Yeah, I think from growing up working in recording studios and working at concerts, you know, "the moment" is everything. The moment is what you're trying to catch. To the extent that tone can get you to "the moment," it's important. There can be times where trying to get the tone takes you farther from "the moment," that "moment" where everybody holds their breath.
A lot of people who've worked in studios for a while have experienced this thing where, you get all the gear sounding good and you get the band out there tracking live and there's this moment where everything starts to click. Everything sounds good, the band sounds good, and a hush falls over the whole situation. Nobody wants to break that surface tension of the moment. Inside that moment, you can do so much and experience so much and feel so much. It's just magical.
Nobody in that room was chasing a tone. They were chasing a moment, and sometimes you need the tone to get to the moment, but sometimes the tone can get in the way of the moment. You gotta make sure you keep your eyes on the ball.
What's next for Believable Audio and 29 Pedals?
Honig: I'm working on a lot of different things. You know, we didn't put out anything new in 2025 because I had an explosion of ideas and I have fifteen or twenty things halfway to seventy-five-percent completed.
I'm trying to make sure that what I'm doing fills a need that I need and maintain my ethic of doing stuff that I want to do or that I want to see in the world, not just make a flanger pedal because there's flanger-shaped hole in the 29 Pedals lineup.
You want to be able to really be excited about the things that you're making.
