Feature Articles » Dream Jobs 2004

Dave Fruehling: His Job Rocks!

Age:

32

What He Does:

Designs digital guitars that model classic guitars and related products

For Whom:

Line 6

Where He Does It:

Agoura Hills, Calif.

Fun Factors:

Plays with priceless guitars and amplifiers; works surrounded by people with musical talent; sees his "baby" in the hands of rockstars (and gets to meet some); knows his daughter thinks his job is cool; gets calls from his grandmother when she sees one of his guitars on TV

Rock stars are thrilled to meet him. Teenage boys want his autograph. But Dave Fruehling is not some kind of longhaired pop star; he's a shorthaired electrical engineer, a mild-mannered systems architect at Line 6, the electric guitar and amplifier company in Agoura Hills, Calif.

Fruehling didn't set out to be an EE. No way; his dad was an EE—a long-time employee of Motorola Inc.—and Fruehling was into youthful rebellion. Heading off to college in 1989, in his 1976 Pontiac Firebird with Rush blasting on the CD player and an electric guitar on the back seat, he had set his sights on being a rock star and getting his picture on the cover of Guitar Player magazine.

But he soon realized that as an instrumentalist, anyway, he would never find his way into the pantheon of guitar gods. His grades as a music major at the University of North Florida in Jacksonville were dismal. Before long he was spending more time tinkering with electric guitars than playing them. This was nothing new: a week after he got his first guitar at age 11, he took it apart; during high school, he spent some 20 hours a week building sound-shifting circuits described in his dog-eared copy of Craig Anderton's Electronic Projects for Musicians.

In 1993, Fruehling bowed to the inevitable—maybe it was in his genes—and switched his major to EE.

From that point on, he was a straight-A student. "Once I focused on engineering, it became my complete passion," he recalls.

Music Man:: Dave Fruehling thought he would grow up to be a guitar player, but his job designing digital electric guitars may be even more fun.

A two-year stint after graduation at hard-disk maker Seagate Technology LLC in Simi Valley, Calif., gave Fruehling engineering experience and enabled him to see the business card (on the desk of a co-worker) of the vice president of engineering at Alesis. Fruehling perked up; he knew that Alesis, in Santa Monica, Calif., put out music-related systems. The timing couldn't have been better: Alesis was hiring engineers to design a hard-disk recorder, and Seagate had announced that it was leaving California.

From Alesis he soon moved on to his present company, Line 6. Formerly Fast Forward Designs, it had consulted for Alesis but was also making its own products—guitar amplifiers, which lined up perfectly with Fruehling's passion.

At Line 6, Fruehling developed the bass guitar version of the POD, the company's flagship project. The POD is a kidney-bean-shaped signal-processor-based device that makes transistor-based guitar amplifiers sound exactly like vacuum tube amplifiers. For Fruehling, working on the POD was a dream come true. After all, to get the modeling down right, he had to obtain and test a dazzling variety of pathbreaking vintage amplifiers (still scattered today throughout the company).

After a brief stint researching the feasibility of building a USB (for Universal Serial Bus) guitar-computer interface (a project that was handed to another team), Fruehling, along with fellow senior design engineer Pete Celi, took on a blue-sky research project. The basic idea was to develop an electric guitar that, through massive digital signal processing, could convincingly mimic the unique sounds of the most legendary electric and acoustic guitars. It would be almost like taking an ordinary violin and giving it a switch that could let it sound not only like a Stradivarius but also a Guarneri or a Ruggieri, depending on your mood.

"When we started," Fruehling recalls, "we had no idea what we were going to make. Were we going to make a guitar? A box you plug a guitar into? An acoustic pickup that doesn't plug into the guitar at all?"

"It wasn't like an amp," he adds. "You can't just plug in a signal generator; you can't create a controlled signal by plucking the strings. And if it could be done, could it be done at a reasonable price?"

The project took two years. The result is the Variax, an electric guitar that looks fairly unremarkable, except for one extra knob that has the names of classic guitars. It models 50 historic guitars, faithfully capturing all their beloved quirks, like the distinct twang of the Fender Stratocaster or the singing sustain of the Gibson Les Paul. The product came out in November 2002, and more than 10 000 have been sold at an average price of US $1000. It is being played by a growing cadre of stars like Pete Townsend, Steve Howe, and Joe Walsh, along with a host of ordinary folks.

These days, Fruehling hobnobs with guitar gods who come to his office or invite him backstage to quiz him about the Variax. He has met several of his idols, including Eddie Kramer, the producer/engineer on Jimi Hendrix's albums, and Craig Anderton, the author of the guitar projects book that figured so prominently in his high school days. He gets a thrill when he sees guitar players on TV with his guitar in their hands.

Each morning, Fruehling spends an hour or two working on a computer interface for the Variax. In the early afternoon, he consults on a variety of internal projects, before getting together with Celi to make plans for the evolution of the Variax. Sometime during the day, he'll play a guitar for an hour or so, sometimes in the guise of testing, sometimes just for fun.

When he wants to jam, there's no shortage of partners; the majority of Line 6's 200 employees play. Many offices contain mixers and high-quality amps, along with a variety of guitars. Fruehling usually has half a dozen in his.

And in July 2003, Fruehling's photo appeared in Guitar Player magazine. "I always thought when that happened, I'd be holding a guitar and have long hair and fire shooting around me," he says. "But I'll take it this way, sitting in my office with scopes on the desk and equations on the whiteboard."

—Tekla S. Perry

By Photo: Henry Blackham