When you say "Empress Effects," you think "a Canadian engineer who started with a favour for a friend." And that's exactly it — because one of the most innovative effects pedal makers in the world was born from a story that could be the plot of a comedy.
In 2005, fresh out of Queen's University with a degree in electrical engineering, Steve Bragg from Ottawa got a simple task from a friend: build a tremolo with features that didn't exist on the market. Steve spent seven months on it. When he finally presented the finished pedal — his friend had already bought a different tremolo and no longer needed one. Steve was left with a dilemma: what to do with the pedal he'd built? He took it to a local used instrument store. The store was so impressed it immediately ordered ten units. And that's how Empress Effects was born.
After the tremolo's success, Steve tackled the Superdelay — and the project consumed him for two full years. That wasn't accidental: Empress set a standard of absolute functional depth from the very beginning. Every pedal wasn't just an effect — it was a small workstation. A compressor with a sidechain input. Parametric EQ instead of graphic. Stereo outputs. MicroSD cards. The company consistently did what others were afraid to: cramming studio-grade capability into pedal format.
The culmination of that philosophy is ZOIA — a device that completely redefined what a guitar pedal can be. ZOIA is essentially a modular synthesizer in pedalboard form: over 80 modules (oscillators, LFOs, filters, VCAs, ADSRs, bit crushers, delay lines, loopers, overdrives, cab sims...) connected like Lego blocks on an open canvas. You can build your own reverb from scratch, design a synthesizer, create a MIDI controller — or simply load one of 64 ready-made patches and play. ZOIA is simultaneously the most advanced and most democratic device in its segment: an open community exchanges patches, firmware is developed with active user input, and the code is open to external developers.
Empress is a company that has never copied anyone else's design. Every circuit — original. Every effect — thought through to its absolute limits. It's the choice for those who don't want "another delay pedal," but a tool that grows alongside them.
