Why we're better

The universal why is that you’re supporting an innovative, family-owned small business which believes in designing and making the best gear possible with the longest possible working lifespan and proper repairability. To the best of our knowledge every item sold by Barefaced since 2008 (that’s thousands of cabs) is still in use (please tell us if that’s not true!) We predominantly employ young local musicians, two currently releasing original material in their bands and the other three of us have various musical projects also on the go.

For the bass cabs, the specific why is that they’re designed to sound great with maximum low frequency output, high sensitivity, massive power handling and excellent dispersion - many bass cabs sound great when its quieter but rehearsals and gigs often get louder and if they can’t generate the output then the tone falls apart. And without great dispersion tone will only be good if you stand in the right place. We designed unique 10” and 12” drivers (which have more bottom than 15”s and 18”s), precisely engineering enclosures and crossovers and even invented a new type of speaker cabinet. Oh yes, and they’re far lighter than you’d expect because of the unique way we build them.

For the guitar cabs, again the core tone is amazing but instead of maximising output, sensitivity and power handling, we’re trying to solve a different problem - as you’ll know guitar is rarely too quiet, the problem is inconsistent tone around a venue and from venue to venue, or poor audibility especially on small stages - it’s mostly a dispersion issue. The other thing about guitar cabs is that smaller ones tend to sound “small”. It’s not a case of loudness but of the frequency balance and how the sound fills the room. That’s why we invented the Augmented Vent Diffractor (AVD) cab design - bigger sound, all around the room, wherever you stand. And as with the bass cabs they’re very light (lighter still if you go with a custom neo driver).

For the first pedal, the Machinist - this is a triple parallel clean/fuzz/distortion. They’re handmade here in our factory, built tough from great components, through-hole throughout so repairable in decades’ time, and sound epic. Normally running parallel signal chains requires a lot of fiddly routing and often multiple amps and cabs. With the Machinist you can get a triple amp sound from a single amp. Sounds great on guitar, bass, synths, vocals, whatever you fancy. The distortion channel can run from clean through overdrive to heavy distortion, the fuzz covers a world of squared off fun with its wide gain range and tone controls and then the clean channel can be filtered from full range to just mids and lows to just lows.