Interview: Effects Legend Sagar Panaflex, Inventor of Customer-Hostile Design
"The customer should be punished, actually."
Welcome back to Effective Ethical World Domination, the house newspaper of Reality Architect LLC!
One of our many ventures is my noise-rock and electronica group, The Sine Crusher Conspiracy. Backstage after our set at SXSW we met Sagar, one of my heroes.
Sagar’s guitar effects and synthesizer modules are legendary. If you’re lucky enough to find one of his handmade devices on Reverb.com, you may have to take out a mortgage to afford one. We talked about his method, his most famous creations, and what’s next.
Onward and upward! — Harrison
Harrison:
Sagar. So glad to have you here. You’ll never guess what I got in the mail yesterday.
It’s time for a reunion. It might get emotional.
[Harrison hands Sagar a box bearing the classic PanaflexEffects logo. Sagar opens the box.]
Sagar:
No! Too cool! An original 4’33’’! It’s like meeting an old friend after 35 years apart.
This was my first hit.
Harrison:
Yes! An actual 4’33’’. An instant classic. Tell us about it.
Sagar:
Ok, you plug your mics, your guitars, everything into the input, and the output goes to the PA. When you stomp on the switch, you hear John Cage’s 4’33’’.
Harrison:
Four minutes and 33 seconds of silence. The pedal shuts off your signal.
Sagar:
Yes. Unprecedented. No effects manufacturer had ever done it before.
The first version of the pedal had a timer. The silence would last only four minutes and thirty-three seconds, as Cage intended.
Customer feedback said that wasn’t long enough. So we improvised.
The second edition has a DIP switch you can use to turn that option off. You turn the pedal on, and it kills 100% of your signal, for as long as you want.
For most bands, the 4’33’’ is the only way to improve their songwriting, their rhythm, and their tone. Paul McCartney used it in every Wings album and concert. It was the secret of Linda’s sound.
Sound guys in clubs loved it. Used it secretly. Hid one or two pedals under the front of house mixer.
I still get love letters from those guys. One named his first two sons after me. True story.
Harrison:
Ingenious. And the best part is that you told the musicians that they were hopeless. The ad copy is legendary. Late-sixties movie poster style, huge letters: “GIVE UP.”
Sagar:
They loved it.
They knew that the only way they could improve their sound was by turning the volume knob anticlockwise until it can’t turn any more. Tufnel’s amp goes to 11. My pedal sends it to zero, where it belongs. There’s honesty in it.
They ate it up. Couldn’t keep it in stock.
Why? Secretly, every rock musician knows that he’s a dumb fucking moron and a talentless charlatan.
Some people are willing to pay to be abused. And they paid up.
Harrison:
And what did you charge for it?
Sagar:
$500. In 1969 dollars.
Harrison:
That’s over $4000 today. And what happened?
Sagar:
I charged that much because I wanted to be left alone. I hate soldering, actually. I wanted the orders to stop.
But when I raised the price from $30 to $500, sales went insane. I had to hire staff to keep up.
News got out that we had 5 month delays. The 4’33’’ has only five parts. You can make one in twenty minutes. But even then, we couldn’t keep up.
I told Rolling Stone I’d stop at 5000 units. I’d had enough.
When I did that, rock musicians started showing up at my workshop with suitcases full of $100 bills. They had to have it.
Harrison:
This was a revelation.
Sagar:
Yes. They don’t teach this in business school.
Hike prices, insult the customer, make products of dubious quality, drag your feet when making them, refuse to provide supply when demand is through the roof … then profit?
It’s like living in NYC and finding a way to turn rats into gold bars.
I asked a lawyer if this business plan was legal. He said yes, and then begged us to let him invest $100k. He did quite well in the end. Smart guy.
Harrison:
This is how you invented customer-hostile design.
Sagar:
Yes. The customer is not always right. The customer is clueless.
The customer should be punished, actually.
Harrison:
For the next 20 years, your workshop put out one hit after another.
I’ll name a device, you tell me the angle.
First up. The “50/60.”
Sagar:
Love this one. If you use humbucker pickups, you lose the 50Hz or 60Hz hum from the wall power. That’s why they invented humbuckers.
But what if you miss the hum? What if it’s part of the tone?
This pedal brings back the hum. If you want a British, early Clapton/Beck/Page tone, select 50Hz. For Buddy Holly, Hendrix, etc, select 60Hz.
Harrison:
The “Emperor.”
Sagar:
It’s a true bypass box. One input, one output, two strands of insulated audiophile-grade Nogami cable, each 8cm long.
Any electrical engineer will tell you that this pedal literally does nothing to your tone. It’s a guitar cable in a box. And to drive the point home, inside of each box is a tiny copy of “The Emperor’s New Clothes.”
You’d think that people would get it.
But on gear forums, they’re still comparing vintages of The Emperor, talking about how we changed from lead solder in the 1990s to lead-free solder — still talking about how that ruined the tone. 1982 editions go for $100,000 because people think BB King used it on an album. Joe Bonamassa owns 30 of the 1982 editions, keeps them in a temperature-controlled 24-7 guarded vault.
Can’t make this shit up.
Harrison:
Decades after the 4’33’’, you’re on every MBA program’s reading list. You’re popular in the Valley. Do you have any disciples? Any products that have impressed you?
Sagar:
Anytime that someone charges a lot for something that doesn’t work well, and then the customers use that pain and suffering to create a community that “Stans” … is that it, “Stans?”
Harrison:
Yeah.
Sagar:
Well, they Stan the product. It’s like — you sell a defective product at a high price, and the customers get Stockholm syndrome and decide to become unpaid salespeople. Win-win-win. The objectively poor quality of the product is the reason why they love it.
Tesla. The Fuzz Factory guitar pedal. Literally everything that hipsters get into. Vinyl. Homebrew. Buying handmade items for 20x what you would pay at H&M.
In the age of the CNC machine and the digital emulator, selling imperfect crap is the only way you can get a good margin.
Make it bad. Make it inconvenient. And watch people build their identity around it.
You can get any Synthesizer sound out of Ableton Live. It’s cheap and easy. Do people want to use it?
No! They want to suffer! And they’re willing to pay for this service.
So they spend $20k to crowd their apartment with fiddly synth modules that don’t work and do an unpaid part-time job just maintaining it.
I’ll sell them that shit, 8 days a week. Sign me up.
Harrison:
Speaking of synths: tell me about Eurorack N+1. This has taken customer-hostile design to a new level.
I think the EU is investigating?
Sagar:
Yes. I love getting the call from Brussles telling me I’m in deep shit. It means that I knocked it out of the park again.
We did customer research into Synth players. We found they don’t actually like playing the things. They just like spending $350 a month and receiving a new module in the mail, then selling them at a loss six months later.
We said we’d accept 500 people for a subscription contract. Sign here, and in perpetuity we will charge you $350 inflation-adjusted dollars for a new module. A new one each month.
What does the module do? Who cares? Put a VCO or something in there, it’s two op-amps and $1.00 of parts. Tell people the op amp is from Russia, made out of germanium, whatever. If the art is good on the front, people will be happy. You don’t even need to connect the knobs to anything on the circuit board. It’s fine. People can still hear the difference when they twist the knobs.
The waiting list for the Eurorack N+1 group is currently 1735 people, and growing all the time.
The EU consumer protection agency says that our Eurorack N+1 package tracking page is the single most addictive site on the internet. People refresh and refresh and refresh like rats pushing the cocaine lever.
I mean, put that on my gravestone, okay? The EU hates me more than Elon? I love it.
Harrison:
I don’t think we can top that. That’s a great place to stop. Sagar, love your work. Thanks for coming out today.
Sagar:
Thank you, Harrison.