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Pedal Playhouse’s joyous animated pedal demos are like nothing you’ve ever seen
We chat to Jo Braga the mind behind the wildly inventive Pedal Playhouse YouTube series about how she’s injecting childlike curiosity back into guitar videos.
Jo Braga – AKA Joan Of Hearts – doesn’t make your run-of-the-mill pedal demos over on her channel Pedal Playhouse. Instead, each one is a lovingly-crafted animated film, during which the pedal’s artwork comes to life, and explains to Jo how they work. The videos are a joyous watch – if you’ve ever felt like pedal demos are infomercials in disguise, Pedal Playhouse is the antidote.
Our interview begins with an unsurprising revelation: “When I was a kid, of course, I watched a lot of cartoons,” Jo tells us. “I was part of the generation that had Saturday morning cartoons, I was always quoting them and doing the voices with my dad.”
The path to animation and music for Jo, like it is for so many, was a complex one. “As I got older I started playing sports – I played ice hockey, and I got into college, because I played the sport. But they didn’t have an animation programme.
“So I kind of had to fall back on, well something else to, you know, feed myself. I got a degree in media arts – so I’m kind of like a… Joan of all trades,” she says, with a wry smile.
All trades in this case means, among other things, “sound design, graphic design, some fine art stuff.” Having graduated, she “joined corporate America”, doing video editing “for a big computer company, their commercials and so on.”
What moved Jo to create the Pedal Playhouse project, however, is something she’s only recently been open in public about. “How it started wasn’t: ‘Hey, I have a great idea, this is awesome, let’s start this thing!’ – It’s a little darker: in the middle of 2021, I got very, very sick. I could only eat about five things. Essentially my oesophagus stopped working, but no one knew that at the time. I was losing weight, I couldn’t eat anything, things started to not function as well.
“So several times I had these thoughts about my mortality. And if this was something that was actually happening to me, I always wanted to do something in animation. I was always disheartened that I wasn’t able to get into that.
“I thought: if this was the last thing I ever created. Why don’t I actually, in my pain and suffering, use those times to learn animation as a distraction. Let me learn a creative project so that if I was to die, I would actually put that time towards a passion project that puts my personality forward. It is me that’s there, that you see. For my friends and family, anybody who’s left behind – that’s me.”
This, ultimately, is part of the reason for the joyous, childlike tone of Jo’s videos. “We’re looking at a pedal, that’s part of it,” she says. “But really, it’s approaching things with the curiosity of a child again. The idea that, despite whatever else is going on in the world, there’s this thing with a sense of wonder and whimsy, and that anything is possible.”
When it comes to capturing a childlike sense of wonder and whimsy, Jo points to one specific point of inspiration. The “Playhouse” in her channel’s name might have already given you a clue what it is. “If you think about Pee Wee’s Playhouse – it’s this world where all this is literally happening, all this craziness – and that world is being built up over time..”
That worldbuilding has been going since her first demo, which looked at the Old Blood Noise Endeavors Sunlight. The character Jo created for the Sunlight is as warm and ethereal as the pedal itself. “I so enjoyed every aspect of creating this character, becoming them, this nurturing presence that guides you through the pedal. The whole thing is – finding a way to not only explain the pedal, but also to capture the personality of it. And doing it in a way which, for a time, let’s you forget the things that are not so bright out there.”
With each demo, it’s like I’m picking away at the next step in the world-building. I have so many ideas I want to get to. It’s that childlike curiosity of like, what’s possible? What can we do? Where can we go? Like, that’s mostly what’s driving me.”
There’s also a healthy groundwork laid for Jo in terms of creative spins on the pedal demo format – she’s got a lot of praise for her contemporaries. “I’ve always loved Knobs’ work. And the other person that deeply inspired me and I always tell him again and again is De’von Blue Whitaker, and his demo channel. The way he presents guitar pedals: it’s not only like the music that you hear, but it’s the visual art that he does in crafting. It’s also the props that he uses. It’s a really pleasing aesthetic – watching those pedal demos, its art in motion. The attention to detail is something I really appreciate so much – if the devil’s in the details, I’ve definitely lost my soul, because I am a sucker for details.”
“And Anne Sulikowski, how she does her drone music, and all the visuals are tied into what you’re hearing. It’s its own art form – you’re seeing in motion and movement, not only with visuals, but sound.”
“I also love love love Working Class Music – Jason, Tia, Lance, all of them: the way they inject their pop culture humour is the same way I do at times. The animation, the anime, the pop culture reference, like in the middle of demos, even like in the sarcasm, and the editing is just great. Sorry, you’re seeing me gush in real time!”
“We’re all different when it comes to demo channels, but I think that is so essential. It’s so lovely to see. I want to be inspired. I want to see what everybody brings to the table. And it’s not just videos – I have a lot of friends who are pedal builders. With them, there’s this exchange of creativity. Sure, we use different vehicles for our art. But what they do inspires me, and what inspires me can inspire other people to pick up a guitar and start playing.”
Production process
Unsurprisingly, Jo’s release schedule is a little less frequent than the rest of the YouTube demo world’s. That’s not to say she’s slacking – far from it. “It takes time, she says. It’s just me doing, like, the work of an entire creative department. I still have a life apart from this, too, and I have my health to deal with. This is a passion project.”
Jo does make sure her audience knows why she can’t pump out weekly videos. “On Instagram and Tik Tok, I always make sure that I show the behind-the-scenes with time-lapses and so on. So you see all the work. Having started to show that process, I get less pressure now – there’s more of an understanding that it’s not possible for me to release on that schedule.”