Guitar pedal YouTuber Cohen Hartman makes a major psychedelic rock statement with help from other Louisiana musicians

In late 2021, veteran songwriter and music producer Cohen Hartman—known locally by his acclaimed bands Cohen and The Ghost and Neon Mountain—had a booming YouTube channel for demonstrating how different effect pedals can make a guitar sound like almost anything.

After creating original songs with new pedals across more than 100 episodes, Hartman was burnt out. But instead of putting his instruments away, this self-described maximalist chased a bigger idea: use as many pedals as possible to record an album, film the entire process, then give all the featured gear away to his viewers. The endeavor became not only a creative win, but a logistical triumph.

“I wanted to do something fresh for the channel, and I wanted to do something that hadn’t been done before,” Hartman says. The pedal companies were thrilled with the idea, and donated gear poured in. Hartman then amassed a cast of talented friends from across Louisiana to help bring his new songs to life.

“I’ve always moved forward very confidently in the music realm, because I don’t feel confident about a lot of other things in life,” Hartman says. “I’ve always enjoyed the feeling of creating these little pockets, these little worlds, that are reflective in some way.”

For the blossoming guitar gear influencer—though he rejects that term—and music teacher who spent the pandemic recording in his laundry room, the album could not have come at a more perfect time.

“We had our challenges, but it was just so fun to jam with this group of people,” says bassist Taylor Matherne. “We were coming off the lockdowns when there wasn’t a lot of live music, so we all had this excitement about being in a room and finally getting to play together.”

This energy propels the music with an aggressive drive, pushing the instrumentals in unexpected directions without losing focus. This is not a delicate spacious meditation. It’s a psychedelic excursion draped in manic rock with torrential textures around every corner.

The resulting album, Here’s To The World as We Don’t Know It, was released this fall, following the intimate 25-episode docu-series Let’s Make Some Noise, which rolled out in 2022 and 2023.

When the final note faded, more than 80 different guitar pedals had been used in the course of 12 nights of intense recording.

“It was challenging—in the best way possible,” Matherne says. “It’s a cohesive experience, even though it has different effect pedals on every single song, which is just amazing to me. I hope people hear the depth of what all is happening on the album, because it is a wild ride.”

The double-vinyl record is available at spiralcaster.bandcamp.com, and the album is streaming now. The video series and nearly 300 guitar pedal demonstrations are viewable on the YouTube channel SpiralCasterPlaysPedals.

With the album, Hartman and his collaborators prove that when you wrestle with it from every possible angle, even the void deserves an emphatic toast.

This article was originally published in the December 2025 issue of 225 Magazine.