A brief account of how this got started.

I began building guitar pedals in the spring of 2024. My first pedal was a MAS Effects Bazz Fuss kit - the first time I'd picked up a soldering iron since building hobby electronics as a kid. A software engineer by trade, I was entranced by my ability to so strongly influence my guitar's sound with so few components.

I quickly graduated from kit builds to sourcing components myself, but still using purchased boards. From there, I developed a passion for laying out circuit boards myself in KiCad. Most of my pedals are available as Gerber files on my Music PCB github, and licensed under Creative Commons if you'd like to try building them yourself. The github also includes instructions for how to get PCBs fabricated and other tips and tricks.

All my pedals have a bird reference point. I got into birding primarily via my girlfriend, on a round-the-world backpacking trip in 2018. Since then, our passion for them has only grown, and I wanted to pay homage to the natural world with my pedals. There are almost 10,000 species of birds in the world (we've seen about 700 in the wild). So there's still a lot more pedals to design and build!

Since I started building pedals in 2024, Aviary Electronics has not grown. It's still just me (my girlfriend manages social media). The boards are hand-drawn and fabricated in small runs; every one is populated and soldered at a bench in my basement. I design the enclosures primarily with Photoshop and Illustrator. They're then UV printed in even smaller batches.