Part of the occasional series “Patented in Pittsburgh”
Michael Mecca’s obsession with audio effects began at a young age.
The budding guitarist got his hands on his first synthesizer as a child growing up in Buffalo, N.Y.
“I opened it up and I saw God. I was just amazed at everything inside,” Mr. Mecca said recently, sitting in the back room of a converted house on the South Side that serves as his office. In the late 1990s, Mr. Mecca opened Pittsburgh Digital, his audio technology firm.
Now an audio hardware and software engineer, Mr. Mecca is creating audio effects pedals for guitarists.
He and a colleague, Jaime Stillman, received a patent in February for their forward and reverse delay effects pedal. It’s sold commercially on the company website, in guitar stores, and through third-party distributors under the name Avalanche Run.
A forward delay effect is just like an echo, Mr. Mecca said. It’s a fairly easy thing to engineer in an audio effects pedal.
A reverse delay is more complicated, as it takes whatever sound goes into its input and immediately plays it back — in reverse. Kind of like the sound of a vinyl disc being spun backward on a record player.
Mr. Mecca created the pedal over two years ago with Mr. Stillman, who is the chief executive of EarthQuaker Devices, a pedal manufacturer in Akron, Ohio.
Customers had requested a pedal that had both a forward and reverse delay.
So Mr. Stillman brought the idea to Mr. Mecca and the two worked together. Mr. Mecca handled the programming and Mr. Stillman suggested changes.
It took them a few weeks to churn out a workable prototype.
Many pedals on the market have a forward delay feature, Mr. Mecca said, and a few have a reverse delay.
Their patented idea — the novel thing about the Avalanche Run — is that the pedal can switch between the forward and immediate reverse delay with the flick of a switch.
“It can be very musical, very natural and not require a whole lot of cognitive resources while you’re playing to just do that with your foot,” Mr. Mecca said. In other words, musicians don’t have to think a lot while using the device to change their sound.
The reverse delay pedal looks like any other effects pedal that guitarists have at their feet during a live show. A small box, it has different knobs and dials that can be manipulated. Wires stick out of the sides, connecting to the guitar and amplifiers.
Avalanche Run, which sells for about $300, has an icy blue and white design reminiscent of its name.
Inside is a small green board holding a chip programmed with an algorithm designed by Mr. Mecca. That’s key to making the whole pedal work.
An Avalanche Run audio effect pedal designed by Michael Mecca, CEO of Pittsburgh Digital is pictured Friday, Aug 17, 2018 in the South Side. (Lake Fong/Post-Gazette)
After a few weeks of tweaking the algorithm to get rid of the sharp clicking noise typical of any audio disruption — the sort of noise that sounds like a firecracker has gone off next to your ear drum — the two had a pretty unique invention.
Unique enough that it got approved by the U.S. Patent Office in notably quick fashion: 11 months, start to finish.
George Mason University’s law school found that, on average, the waiting time for a U.S. patent is a little over three years, according to 2015 research.
“Nobody’s pedal does what theirs does,” said their attorney, Louis Wagner, who works for a small firm FisherBroyles near Akron. “That’s what everybody dreams for. When you get something and say: ‘I’m defining the field.’”
Michael Mecca, founder of Pittsburgh Digital, has patented an audio effects pedals for guitarists that allows musicians to switch between forward and reverse delays to achieve a novel sound. (U.S. Patent and Trademark Office)
Because he is no expert in electrical systems, Mr. Wagner said putting the patent application together was a team effort. He had to rely on the two creators’ expertise.
Mr. Mecca recalls working a lot on diagrams. He said having to sit down and explain why the invention was enjoyable, although he acknowledges that for others, “It may be hell.”
The Avalanche Run is in a sizable market. According to a 2015 report from the National Association of Music Merchants, the effects pedal market in 2014 was worth nearly $80 million in the U.S.
Although Pittsburgh Digital’s version is selling well — more than 10,000 have been purchased so far — the Avalanche Run won’t make the two men into billionaires. That doesn’t really matter, Mr. Stillman said.
“It’s just cool to just own the rights to a thing, and to know that your thing is unique to you,” Mr. Stillman said. “To me, it’s not a money-making thing.”
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First Published: October 15, 2018, 1:00 p.m.
