We started a little over a year ago, trying to finally get a pedal for me that I could really be comfortable with and say ‘this is my signature sound.’ There were a lot of pedals I used to like but they use chips that are no longer RHOS compliant: they’ve got lead in them and other nasty things – they don’t make them any more and if they did, they couldn’t sell them. The guitar player is at the mercy of larger industries that make millions of chips for communication satellites and stuff, and it trickles down to the mad scientists that make pedals for us, but when the technology moves on we’re screwed, we’ve gotta look for some other pedal. I wanted to take some of those old distortion boxed I used to use. I used to use a very old set of Boss DS-1s, and they never, for me, went to 10, and it was always annoying, and they were always scooped out, and it took so much in the studio to get them to sound good. It was very diffucult, and we barely used them in the studio, just once in a while. And live it was a bit of a struggle, because I never felt 100% comfortable. So we went in and said ‘if we had all these pedals that are out there, and we had our choice of components, what would we do?’ So we figured, we’ve got to have a pedal that can not only go to 12, let’s say, but it also sounds great at 4 or 6. So that means one thing electronically. Then when you’re on 12, we want it to be able to go to 24. So we added a switch that says ‘More’ on it. And that’s what it does: It doesn’t increase the volume, it just increases the saturation of the distortion. Everything in it had to be completely reliable, but also I wanted the sustain to be increased, but not the aggressiveness of it, and that took a very, very long time, because it’s a combination of diodes, op amps and transistors and the way they’re wired together, and myself, Mike Bradley, the head of the team in New York, Masahiro Lee in Tokyo, and Steve Grimrod in London, we met several times at my house, and we’d be in my basement playing for 12 hours a day. All four of us guitar players, we all play different, and we’d just keep playing, agreeing, arguing. We’d scratch our heads and the soldering gun would come out and new components would get put in, and we just kept working on it. We didn’t rush it. The prototypes wound up on the end of my last tour. They wound up being used on the album in many different situations.