Sometimes great things come from unlikely places. People tend to latch onto a great recording, a quality piece of gear, or any other material construct they identify with, and because of their elevated opinion of it, they naturally assume it came from some ivory tower in a huge metropolis, supported by a steel girded network of adoring fans, huge facilities, advanced technology, limelight, and glamor.
Sometimes, that’s exactly what it is.
But sometimes, it’s not that at all. The truth often couldn’t be further from this idealized notion of where great deeds, feats of engineering and works of art come from.
Sometimes it’s a man named Nick Diener, flung far from the noise and commotion of the city, diligently toiling away in his country ranch in central Michigan; across open fields, down bumpy, two-lane highways, and past the hollowed out shell of post-industrial Midwestern America. He spends his days mixing records, recording bands, and designing and producing original effects pedals –on top of being a full time dad. He calls this universe he’s created Oneder Studios, a callback to a whimsical ’90’s flick starring Tom Hanks.
Diener’s past endeavors include being the front man for pop punk juggernauts The Swellers who although being broken up for several years maintain a cult following, with a recent repress of their record My Everest nearly selling out in just a few short hours.
Since the dissolution of The Swellers, Diener has focused more on his chops as a sonic craftsman; producing and engineering records such as Hot Mulligan’s Pilot and Forest Green’s Nothing Is Special. After finding his sea legs in studio engineering, he began to delve deeper into what makes a record tick. All the way down the “nerd rabbit hole” to those esoteric little beads and boxes gazed upon in wonder by many a child taking apart the television remote for the first time: resistors, capacitors, diodes, operational amplifiers, and the nuances of what makes these tiny semiconducting miracles work in conjunction with one another to produce a thick blanket of ear tickling tone. It was this line of curiosity that led him to start a new company, Oneder Effects.
Designing original audio circuits is tantamount to modern day sorcery. Even the best guitarists and most discerning tone hounds usually have only a ground level understanding of the subtleties and tedium of creating a tool from scratch that will enable an artist to express themselves sonically, every day, no matter what mood strikes them. Diener talks more about this process and how messing it all up time and again led to something great.
“So let’s say I have this mish-mash of ideas, and I don’t even know how to explain it; I send it all to my buddy Matt Manes, and he’s able to run numbers and values and components in simulations on a computer, and say, ‘Yes, this will work,’ or, ‘This is why it won’t work.’ So long story short, through this process I came up with the Oneder drive, which is kind of my flagship pedal, and it’s not based on anything because it’s such an amalgamation of me trying to figure out how to make a circuit and failing.
“I had this version that had, like, five knobs, three of which didn’t do anything useful except in one position, and one day while making a record with No Trigger, I realized I could make this a two knob pedal, so I ended up writing Matt Manes and asked him to take this mess and sort it out. And when we figured it out, I thought, this is cool because I’m not copying this from anybody; this was a total happy accident, and it’s something I’m really happy to release into the world because it’s kind of my thing, and it does something different.”
Since the initial success of the Oneder Drive, Diener has constructed several other circuits including the Red Ryder Distortion, and most recently a collaboration with a professional wrestler.
“The other thing that I’m working now is the FuzzHausen, It’s Dan Hause—the pro wrestler from Detroit, it’s his signature fuzz pedal, and it makes no sense, because he doesn’t even play guitar, but he’s taking over the world. The Rock has tweeted to him, Chris Jericho loves him, all these big time wrestling legends are like, ‘Dan Hausen is awesome!’ And he’s like this sort of Mr. Burns, or Conan O’Brien meets a demon character, and his motto is “Very Nice, Very Evil” which is what I labeled the toggle switch on the pedal.
“So, I make 100 of these thinking, ‘What’s the crossover market? Indie wrestling fans and guitar players? It’s probably pretty small.’ Well, it wasn’t small. I sold out in 40 minutes. So, we put up a preorder and sold another 100 in 12 hours, and then another hundred inside of a week. Then I realized I had to build and ship 300 pedals … which was a lot of pressure; there were supply issues and shipping problems, but I managed to get them all out by December 20 and have them in people’s hands before Christmas.”
Like any other artist, Diener has a vision and a sound that he’s looking to achieve, both in the studio, and in his original circuits. He continues to describe his sonic signature.
“If I start from a recording standpoint, it’s very much a middle of the road as far as old school and modern, I like my drums to sound big and cut through the mix, but I like them to sound real. My guitars, I like to have just enough gain that they are heavy and thick, but can still breathe and take up their own space, vocals I don’t want them to be overly compressed and tuned, but I do want them to be compressed and tuned.
“On the other hand, if two vocals are going at the same time as a double and one is slightly out of tune, that’s what makes it sound like two people, it gives it space and room. Same for guitar, if there’s stereo guitars and one is playing a bit different strumming pattern, that’s OK; that stuff happens live; maybe the guitarist took a quick sip of his beer mid song and missed the pattern by a fraction of a second; that’s the stuff that happens, and that’s what bands sound like.”
This approach of attaining perfect imperfection is no easy task and doesn’t work with every project. He readily agrees that Oneder Effects success has enabled him to be more discerning about what studio work he takes in, preferring projects that complement his workflow and taste as opposed to attempting to copy another engineer’s sound.
“Luckily I’m at the point now where I can just take on the things I want to. A lot of times I band would email me and say “Hey, we want to sound like this band or that band” –and in the past I would do it because I needed the money, now if it’s not really my thing, I usually tell them it won’t be a good fit, and recommend someone else.”
Now, maybe more than ever, musicians and fans alike are paying much closer attention to the role of the engineer, the gear they use, and all the hours of minutia that go into finally making a wax disc that you spin again and again. At Oneder Studios, it becomes immediately clear that there is an identity and a vision here. The vibe is one of confidence and originality.
“It’s the sound of real instruments and real microphones with the help of some modern advancements—not the other way around. It’s whatever I think sounds good. I want people to come here because they trust me, and they want to make a record with me.” He sums it up.
As he sits in his chair surrounded by coils of cable, pedal parts, notes, tools, and the odd coffee cup, Nick Diener comes off as a man on a mission, the pursuit of innovation clearly drives him to create new sounds and better songs. This place has the air of being busy; one look around the room reveals a litany of projects and experiments in process. Something is happening all the way out here in the Michigan breadbasket. Against a bleak winter backdrop and atop the whipping wind a tune can be heard. You might need to listen for it, but it’s there, marching on, growing louder with each passing day.
Find out more at Onederstudios.com and Onedereffects.com
Image courtesy of Nick Diener
