Musicians get a DIY lesson to build their own guitar pedal

Lora Thompson, Audio Head of Department at SAE in Auckland, ran a guitar pedal building workshop last week as a part of RAMP festival. Wintec | Te Pūkenga student Sarah Morcom spoke to her about her current projects. 

Audio engineer and musician Lora Thompson has over a decade of experience in the industry, and is planning to launch her own guitar pedal brand. 

Thompson ran a pedal building workshop this week as a part of the annual RAMP festival. The workshop was focused on building a fuzz pedal, which was one of the first she learned to build herself. 

“I started pedal building around 2018, so I’m still pretty new to it myself”. 

The RAMP festival workshop was limited to around 12 people, and over the day, many students successfully built their own fuzz pedals. Thompson said these pedals can be used to give the guitar a “distorted, low-fi sound”.

Thompson primarily plays the guitar, although said she can play “mostly everything”. She’s currently playing with her bands Empress and The Sour, and has a solo project called Ms. Take.

She said The Sour has just received producer funding from NZ on Air.

Thompson says she loves to use guitar pedals on stage, and uses around 20 different effect pedals when she plays with Empress, each pedal producing a different sound or effect. 

A popular guitar pedal is the loop pedal, which Thompson said she used for busking in her time living in Melbourne. 

Although she has moved around a fair bit for her work, Thompson is originally a Kirikiriroa girl, and studied a Master of Arts with a major in music at Wintec | Te Pūkenga. She also worked for sound companies in Hamilton in the early 2000s. 

Although she loved her time studying, she said it was difficult at times being one of the only women she knew in her field. 

“When I was a student at Wintec many years ago, I think I was the only woman in my intake”, she said. 

“That was quite hard. Especially when I was really young”.

This experience made her want to create spaces where young women could learn about music and audio with strong female influences to guide them. Thompson began to work with programmes like Milk and Honey, and To The Front, which will be hosted in Kirikiriroa Hamilton in 2024. 

“When I was studying I didn’t have any role models that were women. So I wanted to create a support network that can help women do what they want to do. That’s so important to me”. 

Thompson’s career has grown rapidly since those early days at Wintec, and she has now played and worked for several big New Zealand artists, such as Ladi6, Elemeno P, Skinny Hobos, and Devilskin, most of whom treated her as simply another musician she said. 

“They’re kinda just mates, I guess”.

As well as working as a musician, Thompson is the Audio Head of Department at SAE in Auckland, as is working towards her pedal brand. So far, she has only made pedals for friends and family, but said the end goal would be to have them mass produced.

“That’s so far away, though. I’m still working on the first pedal. 

“It has involved a lot of learning how to design circuits and such, but I have made the design for the pedal”. 

Thompson’s workshop has given Kirikiriroa musicians the chance to learn how to build pedals as well. Workshops such as this one give young creatives the opportunity to learn skills that can broaden their area of expertise. 

She’s now working towards new projects with her bands, as well as preparing for To The Front next year.