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Death By Audio

Oliver Ackermann started Death By Audio in Brooklyn making pedals for his own band, A Place To Bury Strangers, and the catalogue still reads that way — the Fuzz War, the Interstellar Overdriver, the Reverberation Machine are built for players who want the circuit pushed past politeness. It is one of the more genuinely uncompromising pedal companies operating, and it features across our fuzz and noise coverage.

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Amp Crash stompbox in use, showing the pedal's cream-colored enclosure with red power LED lit during performance on a woven texture surface

Death By Audio & Rainger FX Amp Crash: A Real Guitar Amp Inside a Pedal

Death By Audio and Rainger FX debut the Amp Crash: a stompbox with a real 3-watt amp, 2" speaker, and mic inside. $395.

Guitar GearBy Jef Stone
Founded2002
Based inBrooklyn, New York, USA
FounderOliver Ackermann
Articles here6
Makes
  • Effects pedals
Known for
  • Fuzz War
  • Interstellar Overdriver
  • Reverberation Machine
  • Evil Filter

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Death By Audio FAQ4 questions

Who founded Death By Audio?

Oliver Ackermann, the lead singer of the New York noise rock band A Place to Bury Strangers, who started the boutique pedal company in 2002. The pedals came out of his own need for extreme sounds rather than from a market study, and that shows in the catalogue.

Was Death By Audio also a venue?

Yes. The name was shared with a warehouse space in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, which took its name from the pedal company based there. It functioned as a work space for artists and musicians, a recording studio, a pedal factory and a well-reviewed art and music venue before it closed.

What is the Fuzz War?

Death By Audio's best-known pedal — an extremely high-gain fuzz that goes well past conventional fuzz into oscillation and collapse. It is not a subtle pedal and is not meant to be; it is the clearest statement of what the company is for.

Are Death By Audio pedals hand-built?

They come out of a genuinely small Brooklyn operation with a hand-built, hand-finished character, and the enclosures and graphics reflect that. Availability of individual models varies, which is normal for a builder of this scale.