Meet the team behind Westerlund Audio

It’s hard to know exactly when Westerlund started. Partly because Shane Henry and Jim Robinson go so far back. They met 25 years ago when Shane put out flyers looking for a keyboard player. Little did he know that Jim would not only become Shane’s bandmate, but ultimately become his father-in-law. 

One year for Christmas Jim made Shane a guitar pedal. It blew Shane away and he kept wondering what else Jim could make. Jim continued building guitar pedals in his spare time for other players which led him to becoming an expert analog pedal builder. 

After years of searching for a specific transparent overdrive sound, Shane finally approached Jim with a vision for a new pedal that he hadn’t quite found in the market. So Jim and Shane set out to create what would eventually become the ONE. 

After tweaking for several months, Shane felt they were getting really close to something special and called on his friend Matt Stansberry, who had experience in music, branding and marketing, to help create a launch strategy for the pedal. Matt and Shane, both musicians from OKC, had become friends through the small local music community and had collaborated on several projects. 

Now with the team assembled, they continued to develop prototypes and were getting ready to launch when then the COVID pandemic hit. This ended up setting Westerlund back…like way back. 

Over the next three years, the Westerlund team had to innovate and tweak the design because of part shortages and other issues; however; with each modification it surprisingly only made the pedal sound better. It wasn’t easy, but the team finally landed on the final version of the ONE, so here we are. 

It’s funny to think this all started with a “keyboard player wanted” flyer.