Guitar pedal maker Red Panda expands product line, staff, and office space in Midtown's Green Garage

Red Panda is a music tech startup that has a little bit more of everything this year. The Midtown-based company has added seed capital, new products, more employees, and a bigger space in the Green Garage.

"It's a space that is three times larger," says Curt Malouin, owner of Red Panda. "It's a little more than 600 square feet."

The 3-year-old startup makes digital guitar pedals for musicians. Guitar pedals have traditionally been analog pieces of technology. Malouin is an electrical engineer with experience working with analog circuitry in the automotive industry. He leveraged that experience to create new guitar pedals that focus on digital signal processing.

Red Panda has a new product in development and recently released another. Bitmap is a bitcrusher with fractional bit reduction and sample rate modulation. It digitized a guitar signal and reduces its sampling rate and fidelity.

"So it sounds like an 8-bit computer or an Atari video game sound," explains Malouin in layman terms.

Increased sales of Red Panda’s products has allowed it to move to a bigger space and double its staff to four people over the last year. The startup also landed a $10,000 NEIdeas grant last fall that is allowing it to purchase new manufacturing equipment that will allow it print graphics on its products and prompt it to hire more staff.

"Bringing graphic printing in house is much more environmentally friendly and faster than screen printing," Malouin says. "It will allow us to bring more products to the market quicker."

Source: Curt Malouin, owner of Red Panda
Writer: Jon Zemke

Read more about Metro Detroit's growing entrepreneurial ecosystem at SEMichiganStartup.com.