Monkey Riot Recordings

01/06/2023

Lotta awesome and deserved press for

I mixed their record over the last 2 years and it’s such a listenable record. Hooks for days. Go give em a follow and listen to their tracks!!!

12/28/2022

Rad Christmas gift from !

I’ve been eyeing it for a while… SST bands were really formative in my music education. Husker Du was one of my early influences and that’s carried thru to today. Dinosaur Jr - another her HUGE influence. Bad Brains… man, they absolutely blew my mind, just amazing! Circle Jerks was the first show I saw in Exit In - one of the few all ages shows there. That was 1987, and didn’t set foot in there again until 7 years later.

Das Damen- upstairs at the Cannery (with Clockhammer opening!). Meat Puppets a couple times - Sals rock block?? Cannery too. And on and on and on!

Looking forward to reading this!

And a shameless plug - support your local Indy bookstores and head over to and I’m pretty sure you too can own this book!

10/13/2022

My band project, kettleflower is in Epi 320 of - they’re such an awesome supporter of the local scene!

We dropped a single with. B-side a couple weeks ago. You can find us on bandcamp and all the usual streaming services - we’ve got a ton of music available, so check out the new single and go for a deep dive in the rest of the albums!

10/13/2022

Congrats to and for having picked as the best new bookshop in the writer’s choice award!!!

So proud of both of them! They’ve worked really hard to create this special space.

09/22/2022

Happy Birthday to my most favorite person in the world!!!

❤️❤️

08/14/2022

08/13/2022

Hey Instagram friends: I’ve setup a dedicated account for my pedal building. I’ll still post my usual garbage here, but give a follow and you can keep up with all the new pedal work I’m doing!

08/03/2022

I'm looking for a laptop PC to run some design software. The only real requirement is that it's got Windows 10 installed. The software is pretty light on requirements, so I'd probably be fine with that 6 years old laptop you've got sitting in the back of your closet. Lemme know if you've got something - willing to trade for some Monkey Riot Pedals hardware too...

Prefer local Nashville.

07/29/2022

Here’s two of the best sounding drive pedals I’ve ever heard. Purple is a Barber Small Fry - man it’s nice. People gravitate to this one. It’s an opamp drive with soft and hard clipping. The switch steps through a couple different paths on the clipping. The dynamics control let’s you dial in how much of the hard clipping you want.

The other one is a JFET drive that’s currently out of production and they’re around that $400 area on Reverb (maybe more!) I keep making one for myself and then someone will buy it from me… it does mild drive up to Velcro bias fuzz. The jfet’s give it some tube characteristics.

As usual, both for sale!

There’s some demos at the link in bio and there’s a YouTube channel for “monkeyriotpedals”

07/10/2022

Finished up a couple of these Sapphire Optical Bass Compressors today. Loosely based on the Diamond compressor - but with some tweaks and additions.

Compression is via a VTL5C3 Vactrol - you can use a LED/LDR combo but they tend to be inconsistent and have different attack & release behavior. The vactrol keeps it in the land of smooth LA2A style response.

These also have a Mix control for parallel compression. You can do some heavy compression and bring in some of the dry signal to preserve dynamics or tonality that gets altered with compression. It also opens up a lot of options when using aggressive EQ’ing with the:

Tilt Eq: this pedal features a tilt eq with a selectable center frequency of 250hz or 900hz. The tilt eq works around a center point - as you turn it counter clockwise, it simultaneously boosts low end while rolling off high frequencies. Opposite with clockwise rotation. Tilt eq is very musical & great for smooth tone shaping.

There is also a hi-cut switch to roll off a little treble. Nice for getting rid of a little string noise.

This pedal runs on 9-18v DC. Higher voltages give you a little more headroom. I also used the OP275 op amp for the compression section of the circuit. The original Diamond comp used them, and I see why. I experimented with other dual op-amps,but the OP275 easily beat all the others.

$175 / 2 available