Explore your sound.
From composition and performance, to education and experimentation, the drive to explore new sounds and venture into the vast musical unknown keeps us creating. Innovation on the next level of the soundscape requires instruments of the caliber we deserve.
At Jake’s Custom Shop, we honor the legacy of Robert Moog, Don Buchla, Dieter Deopfer, and more with our line of custom Eurorack cases and systems, modules, guitar pedalboards, and more. Whether you’re a professional musician or a hobbyist, our products are affordable, robust, and easy to learn, designed with your needs in mind. Because after all, at JCS, we’re more than just instrument providers. We’re musicians ourselves, living to create, innovate, and most of all, help you find your sound.
Our versatile products, led by the signature Modular Zero Complete Eurorack System, feature high-quality craftsmanship meant to stand the test of time. From our materials, to power supplies, we want JCS to hold its own against the more prominent brands, so we give it our all. Likewise, our stellar customer experience ensures you get the product your art deserves. Providing customization options and quick updates on building and delivery, JCS is there for you. Seriously, just look at our reviews.
Venture into the musical unknown.
Have Jake’s Custom Shop guide your quest today.
Jake Lehotsky is a graduate student studying Embedded Software Engineering. He graduated in 2021 with a Bachelor’s in Electrical Engineering from Penn State University. Working at Bison Hill Stonecrafts, he was inspired by their passion and products and founded Jake’s Custom Shop in 2016.
By the end of 2021, the shop included the Modular Zero Complete Eurorack System, Eurorack cases, modules, and four basic LED pedalboard designs.
In his spare time, Jake enjoys running, biking, sailing, and playing guitar.
The first JCS product was a 24x17 inch guitar pedalboard built for personal use. Not long after getting started, Jake added different sizes and different materials to an Etsy shop. In 2017, he began school at Penn State studying electrical engineering.
By 2020, JCS had four basic pedalboard designs. Each of these had numerous variations for material type, color, power supply capabilities, and LED underglow. By far the most popular design was the 18x6” mini pedalboard. Jake’s personal favorite, though, was the 36x13 inch, which featured cutouts in the front for power wiring and Velcro straps for two power supplies underneath.
Over the Christmas break of 2021, Jake built the first JCS Eurorack case. This was a small 3Ux84HP with extra fancy box-joints. At the time, he only had three homemade modules: a LMNC super simple triple oscillator, a baby-8 sequencer, and a snare drum/ hi-hat module. It seemed like it would take all eternity to fill a single 84HP row of our own modules.
The Eurorack cases really took off. By the end of summer 2021, JCS had a whole line of cases, some with lids, some as large as 9Ux150HP, and some with our own Eurorack Power Bus.
But whenever Jake attempted to explain eurorack to a layman, he always got the response: “oh cool, so you make the modules?” Which we didn’t ... yet. In September 2021, on the front porch of a cabin in the woods, Jake wrote the business plan to create an affordable, robust, easy and fun complete eurorack system. In less than 6 months of incubation, the Modular Zero was born.
Now, Jake’s Custom Shop still makes custom pedalboards, but we’ve pivoted our focus to designing and manufacturing eurorack modules. JCS has an amazing team that helps build cases, design modules, solder components and maintain this website. It’s been a wild ride, a ton of fun, and we certainly couldn’t be doing this without the support of my friends, family, and this amazing community of musicians and makers. Thanks for being a part of it!
Now get back to patching,
-Jake & the crew from JCS
Say you are a guitarist and you like to play music by Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin. Sometimes you like the electric guitar to sound distorted, other times you want lots of echo and reverb. You may even want your electric guitar to sound like an acoustic guitar. In order to make all of these different sounds, you buy guitar pedals. Each pedal is an electronic device that changes the timbre of your guitar. However, each pedal requires a power source, an input cable and an output. When you have more than a few pedals, a mess of wires and electronics begin to float around your living room. This is quite cumbersome. By securing your pedals with some hook-and-loop velcro to a surface wires are locked in place and many small entities become one easy-to-move unit. This surface is deemed a guitar pedalboard and is what Jake’s Custom Shop specializes in.
Eurorack modular synthesizers are electronic musical instruments consisting of many “modules” that each have a different musical function. Signals are transferred between modules using many jumper cables. These are typically your standard 3.5mm “Aux Cords''. By turning knobs, flipping switches, and routing signals, a musician can make an unlimited variation of sounds and melodies. An Eurorack may be paired with a keyboard and played like an electric piano. Other times, a sequencer may be used to choose when and what note to play. Modular synths have been around since the dawn of analog electronics in the 1960’s. Today, Euroracks are becoming more and more popular as electronic music enters the realm of popular music.
JakesCustomShop.com has been a side project of mine throughout college. The entire thing is coded “by hand” as opposed to using a web designing software like most websites today. A true deep dive into HTML, CSS and JavaScript; especially for an electrical engineer. The blog page has all kinds of things that interest me like engineering, pedalboards, electronics and some personal projects.