Animal Factory Amplification is a maker of pedals and Eurorack modules based in Bombay, India, known for its unique visual aesthetic and visceral fuzz and distortion designs. In this interview conducted at SuperBooth24 in May 2024, AFA founder Aditya Nandwana talks about how he got into making pedals, what’s it like to operate a music technology company out of India, making distortion pedals for synth players and his ongoing love for silicon fuzz.

What is your own background in music? And how did that lead to you starting to build your own guitar pedals?

Aditya Nandwana: I don’t really have any formal background in music. But I was always listening to music. I did like electronic music, but I was really into that classic rock and hard rock sound — Deep Purple and Led Zeppelin type stuff, which then led into Metallica, Nirvana, Soundgarden and so on. I was about 11 years old when MTV came to India. That was a big thing, because before that, exposure to Western music was very delayed. You’d find things, but only much later.

So I started seeing all the cool cassette covers of bands like Megadeth and Iron Maiden and I was like “I wanna listen to that!”. And obviously, that takes you to the guitar. But I wasn’t so interested in playing it, I was more interested in how it sounded. That was really my first inspiration. We had some electronic music exposure as well, although I was never really into the trance stuff and there was no real techno scene or anything. But you did get exposed to what I’d call the “golden age” of commercial electronic music with artists like the Chemical Brothers, The Prodigy, Orbital, Underworld and so on — artists that are also incredible sound designers.

That started intriguing me, like “what instrument is this?”.  And when you are living in the proverbial cave, and you don’t know what synthesizers are like, that really makes you curious. That really made me get into distortion more than anything, because I was really into the “heaviness” you’d find in something like a Metallica riff. Of course, I did play guitar but very badly (laughs). I wasn’t so much into the virtuoso side of guitar music, it was really about the sound for me.

I wasn’t so much into the virtuoso side of guitar music, it was really about the sound for me.

So almost immediately after I got a guitar, I also wanted a pedal for it. But you have to keep in mind, this was 1997 in India. India had been a closed economy until 1991. All of this was very new to us. If I would have went out and bought a Boss pedal, that would have been 40 or 50 dollars in 1997 dollars — a lot of money for a 17 year old in India in the 90s! That wasn’t something you could just go and do.

But then I met someone very randomly, and he said, you know, you can just buy these parts in local electronic markets and start building things, and then you can make your own pedal. And I thought that sounds really easy, but actually, it wasn’t (laughs)! Because you really didn’t have anything, you had bad parts, there was nothing like bypass switches and so on. So you had to improvise. But still, I did a lot of building and etching, making these PCBs in my bedroom.

How did you learn how to do this — was it through textbooks, or through the early internet already?

Very slow internet, 28.8/kbps speed! In 2002, I had been living in Germany for two years and other kids would download songs and movies and pornography — and I would just download as many circuit diagrams as I could (laughs)! And over time, once the internet became faster, it got a lot easier, because things got easier to find. Once I was in university in Germany, I started working with a software called Eagle. My professors made me learn circuit board design with that software, although most of the time I was just using it to make pedals (laughs).

What was the early online DIY-scene like?

I didn’t know about things like mailing lists until much later, but even on Yahoo you could be looking at a Big Muff circuit diagram just like that. But there was also a lot of wrong information at the time, stuff that was just broken. There were forums and message boards and a couple of very basic websites, three or four sites that everybody went to.

Eventually, while living in Germany, I went to an electronics store and got some aluminum enclosures and switches and that was really the first time I built a “proper” pedal with a shell and a switch, an MXR Blue Box type circuit. It was super noisy and nasty. I gave it away to Alexander Hacke because I had done this acid etching and it had a Einstürzende Neubauten logo on it.

How did things evolve from you just building pedals for yourself to building pedals for other people?

I think what happened was that I was doing something unique at the time, because I was building pedals that looked really nice, but they also had a unique, really aggressive sound. Because I said to myself, I really want the most aggressive fuzz tone possible, I don’t wanna do a fucking clean John Mayer tone…

… Klon! (laughs)

Klon bullshit! I wanted it to be way more rip-your-face-off. So I started building these fuzzes, which was already kind of unique, because no one in India was doing that kind of sound. There was nobody really doing proper pedals in India in general. There were a few companies, but their build quality was bad. My build quality was really good, like any boutique builder in the West. And I had this unique acid etching style for the enclosures, etching with acid and then filling it with black paint and then sanding it back. That was a really long and cumbersome process, it took me like a day to do a pedal sometimes. That got me a lot of attention, although I had to stop doing it as it was really unhealthy for me (laughs). But they were very eye-catching, If you find them, they are still very unique to look at to this day.

So people started approaching you like, “that’s a nice pedal, can I have one, too”?

Yeah, people started approaching me for commissions, doing various custom jobs. And I did do that, initially. But I got annoyed with it over time, because some clients started really overreaching, like "Im paying for your time, so I own you”. Of course I had really nice people as clients as well. But there was a small section that was like, “make me a Boss Metal Zone but with a custom EQ, what’s your price?”. And I’d give them my price, and they’d be like “that’s crazy, I can buy the original for half of that” and so I went “well, then why don’t you, what is this, is this is some cheap Indian labor shop?” (laughs)!

So at some point I said to myself, if I’m going to keep doing this, even as a hobby, I’m going to do a proper production run under my own terms — so you get what I want to make, and not whatever you think you want. Because that was the other problem, they thought they wanted something, but then they played it and they’d say, “But I don’t sound like David Gilmour!” and I’d just say “sorry, I can’t help you with that” (laughs)!

So I eventually started doing little production runs of my own fuzz pedals. They had this unique nasty, very much not vintage, this very modern, wall-of-fuzz type of sound. I sent a couple of them around, one to a David Torn — one of my favorite guitar players of all time, a very unique, textural guitar player. I didn’t hear from him initially, but then he sent me this 20 minute demo, a very textural solo just playing through my pedal. That really got things going for me.

So was there a moment where you suddenly said to yourself, “maybe I can do this professionally”? Or was that something you wanted to do from the beginning?

Maybe subconsciously a little bit, but honestly, this is a bad business (laughs), a very difficult business to be in. What I initially really wanted to focus on were vacuum tube amplifiers, because those were what I was doing at the time. But I was observing someone else who was doing that in India and, I just said to myself “this is commercial suicide” — the costs are very high and it’s an extremely small market. And you can’t do a “boutique, but cheap” thing, it’s unsustainable.

With the pedals, we had a good run with a few pedals, but I was like, “I just wanna do this as a boutique thing, a few pedals a month and that’s it”. But then the person who designed our logo for us said to me “listen to me man, you wanna do this, just do it properly, what’s the point of it if you’re being wishy-washy”?  That didn’t immediately take me to a professional level, but it did lead to me being like, okay, let’s do eighty and not just five.

Then the big moment for me really was when the producer Flood (Mark Ellis) that did a lot of albums that influenced my teenage years took the Pit Viper pedal back to London with him. And he thought it sounded really good and so he showed it to Alan Moulder — and between the two of them, that’s basically my entire music listening history! Nine Inch Nails, Smashing Pumpkins, My Bloody Valentine, Jesus and the Mary Chain, PJ Harvey … So he messaged me and he said we want to order five, one for me, one for Alan, one for St. Vincent, one for Trent Reznor. And of course, I was just like oh my god! I was really just a kid, that was one of the most surreal moments of my life. I’m such a big NIN fan, still am. That really made me think “I’m doing something here”, especially since in India, nobody had ever done anything like that.

AFA is now also situated within the synth world. How did you go from being a pure pedal brand to one that also builds modules?

That happened purely by accident, basically. By total chance, I had connected with Douglas McCarthy from Nitzer Ebb and I came to Berlin to meet him, and he introduced me to Andreas Schneider [of SchneidersLaden]. And it just so happened that Andreas was looking for brands for his Alex4 distribution company at the time and he was really interested in getting some boutique pedals into the distribution lineup. And of course I had everything with me, and so I went and met him and the team. And they said, “this looks really cool, but is there any chance you could do something like this as a Eurorack module”? At that time, I didn’t even have a Eurorack system — I didn’t have any synthesizers at all! So I started by buying a Korg Volca (laughs). I built this little synthesizer and I modified two of the pedal circuits to make them usable in Eurorack. So that’s how it started.

But I have to admit, I’m personally still not a massive Eurorack fan, just because it’s a very expensive hobby, especially in India. Like, if I tell someone here to get into Eurorack, it’s like you’ve spent 500 or 600 Euros and you’ll just have the rack and the power supply (laughs)! There is a small, really tiny, DIY scene of people doing Eurorack here, but it’s not very significant. But yeah, basically we first started modifying things to fit into Eurorack, but then we eventually started entirely building Eurorack modules from scratch, so they’re not just versions of pedals but built from the ground up as modules. I don’t mind the format, but personally I’m also just a lot more straight forward when it comes to messing around with music; drum machine, distortion, go!

Has getting into making modules also influenced your pedal designs?

Absolutely, and getting into making modules was also a fantastic experience of course, don’t get me wrong. Because of it, I started working with many new things, spending a lot of time working with these circuits you wouldn’t normally don’t encounter in pedals. And especially now with the new Godeater+ pedal, that was really heavily influenced by the Godeater module.

It has a lot of features you wouldn’t normally find in a guitar pedal.

Yeah! That actually came about because we did so much module design, so we just said, “we have this VCA and this VCA lying around, can’t we just build this filter, so that we can build a proper sidechain input?”  We first showed it at SuperBooth23 last year as a very simple thing, it was basically just the old pedal with a few tweaks. With this new revamped one, the final decisions all came together in 2-3 months, we had the ideas and executed them really fast. And I don’t think that would have been possible if we hadn’t spent so much time designing modules and understanding modular architecture — and just seeing how we can push the envelope a bit, because I don’t want to be that guy that just rehashes the same things every year, I don’t want to do the same thing every time.

I don’t want to be that guy that just rehashes the same things every year, I don’t want to do the same thing every time.

Are your customers like 50% guitar players and 50% synth players at this point?

I really don’t even know anymore (laughs)! It might be even more synth players now. Because over the last three years, we’ve made the conscious decision to not build any new pedals and really redesign our own pedal enclosure. So now we have our own die-cast proprietary shape that is done here in Bombay; it’s not just some box we get from China. We did that partly because imports became very expensive after Covid, aluminum especially — it all just started adding up too much.

But we also wanted to do something different. So we met with this industrial designer and he said, your brand should also be reflected in the actual shape of the product, and he came up with this really nice sloped octagonal design. That experience has pushed us forward a lot, but because of that we also couldn’t build new pedals for a while so we could have a clean break from the old pedal designs.

So yeah, it’s probably more synth players than ever using our stuff!

So that these synth players can also learn something about proper distortion (laughs)!

Yeah!

Do you have a favorite type of distortion?

It’s definitely fuzz, it’s always been fuzz. I generally like solid state distortion a lot, because I like that slightly brittle sound. My favorite distortion circuit is probably still the Big Muff, a silicon fuzz. I’m not so crazy about germanium fuzzes because India is very hot, and germanium is not so stable at very high temperatures, so it can get a little confusing with these! So yeah, I like the silicon fuzzes, I like their stability and I like their brutality, when it’s just harsh and hard and in your face!

And how do you iterate and innovate on that? I mean with fuzz, that’s basically a sixty year old idea, right?

Yeah, it’s hard — really, really hard! But I don’t think we necessarily pressure ourselves too much to innovate just to innovate. Because if you just think “how can we take this further?” then you might start building things that nobody actually wants. I feel like with the Godeater+ the way we’ve taken it further is that within Ableton I’ve always liked sidechaining different things together, and so I said, “wouldn’t it be nice to get my Godeater to do that?” So that’s an example of a sixty year old idea where it doesn’t actually need that much to iterate on it. I mean, it would be crazy to try and integrate AI or some shit into a fuzz pedal, that would be completely unnecessary (laughs)! But with these rather small changes, you can actually do a lot and really help usability.

Although in the end, you always have to remember that you are really building it for the sound. You can do all sorts of things with the circuit, but if the sound isn’t there, you are missing the point! I think in the end it’s really just don’t be lazy — don’t just make another exact Tube Screamer or Big Muff clone, see if you can do just a little bit more with it.  Like, I don’t know why nobody thought of this before, but with the new pedals we make you can now use any power supply you want, 9v positive or negative, 12v and so on. And I’m just like, why doesn’t everybody do this, am I missing something here? (laughs)

You can do all sorts of things with the circuit, but if the sound isn’t there, you are missing the point!

We also have this new dual overdrive we are releasing called the Ozymandias. The circuit is a Blues Breaker type, inspired by the AnalogMan King of Tone. But I didn’t have “those” diodes, so I just modified the circuit completely. In its original form, we had only made a hyper-limited run of the Ozymandias, we only made five. But it’s unique, it’s huge sounding, so I thought why not take it into production at last? And it is a dual overdrive — there are a lot of dual overdrive — but I haven’t seen any that have separate inputs and outputs for both drive circuits. Again, it’s such a simple change, just an extra switch, but it really opens up a lot of possibilities for the user.

Is there anything you haven’t done yet that you would really like to do in the future?

I really wanna get into more digital stuff, I think. I’m very interested in pitch shifting and delays. My favorite pedal of all time is the Red Panda Raster Delay. It’s crazy. It has a pitch shifter inside the delay feedback loop and if you set it for infinite repeats, dropping or going up on semi-tones, you get these really crazy soundscapes going. I don’t  know how to program, but I’m really interested in getting into that at some point … and I really wanna do a DJ rotary mixer (laughs)! And the other thing I’ve always wanted to build, but have never done, is a really proper 300 Watt, 100% vacuum tube, Ampeg-style guitar amp. But I’m 42 now and I don’t know if my back is going to let me do all that stuff — it’s already painful enough (laughs)!

What is it like operating in and from India right now?

One good thing you are seeing now in India is that people have a little more money than they used to have. But what is unfortunately also happening is that band culture is kind of dying out, because a music scene depends on venues. And if policy does not support venues, you can’t really do anything. Policy makers here are not interested in that at all. Policy is strict, and I think it’s going to get even stricter. Everything shuts down by 1am, licensing is very difficult. And if the venues start dying, then the bands start dying. Corona also did a lot of damage, because nobody was meeting up to play anymore. But there’s still great bands and really incredible musicians here, and I’m sad that they don’t really get more of a global audience.

I am currently really the only person doing proper pedals here in India. I don’t think any brand is selling a lot of pedals locally, like, less than 2% of our total business comes from India. But the nice thing about being in a niche is that you don’t have to find people, they find you. I think if a band in India uses my stuff, they’re already doing a very different kind of sound. But yeah, I’m really craving for good music to be back on stages here and not just online!

Is there anything else you would like to say?

Last year [at SuperBooth23] we showed off a lot of things we were planning to build. But the reality of it was very different, it was very hard to do all that stuff at once. But I think that was also in way good for us, because we really focused on two or three products, and we’ve now built those really nicely: the Godeater+ , the Ozymandias and a new forthcoming module called the Infinite Cruelty Machine — I’m a big fan of Hellraiser! It’s a CV-able matrix mixer, so you can send the output of one effect to another through a VCA and then start automating things, letting things swell in and out. It’s already sounding pretty insane, honestly even kind of scary sometimes!

You can find more information about Animal Factory Amps over at their website and shop a big selection of their products over at SchneidersLaden.