Electric Empress Effects is an audio electronics design and repair shop founded by electrical engineer/musician Rob Bara in the greater Philadelphia region. Locals may be familiar to Rob from the experimental performance project GORF or the space rock duo Silver Machine.

Rob picked up electric bass and flute at nine, later spending his high school years on upright bass with the intent to major in composition. However, he gravitated toward the sounds of psychedelic punk and noise rock, music that pushed sound to its limits and left him wanting to understand the science behind it. That interest led him to study Electrical Engineering and Music Technology at Temple University, where an internship at Ant Farm Music in Stroudsburg, PA put him neck-deep in vintage tube amps, guitars, pedals, and more.

Since then, his engineering career has taken him through autonomous vehicles, biomedical research, and currently designing high-speed network infrastructure as Lead Hardware Design/Validation Engineer.

Electric Empress Effects is where that background of precision and curiosity make a whole new kind of noise — restoring old circuits, building new analog effects, and experimenting with DSP.