Leadbetter | Dopamine | Dual Stage Fuzz Pedal | $399 AUD | PRE-ORDER | $200 Deposit

The Leadbetter Dopamine Dual Stage Fuzz is $399 AUD.  

This listing is for a $200 (AUD) deposit to secure your order. Stock is limited. 

Here’s the deets: 
This is not your Grandma's Fuzz pedal.

Don't ask if we make it smaller. We don't.

So what is it?

The circuit in the Dopamine Dual Stage Fuzz is inspired by the sillicon Fuzz boxes of the 60's and 70's, many of which utilise the same BC108 and BC109 transistor combo we have used in our design. However, our use of Premium Audiophile capacitors make for a far broader sounding, "high fidelity" take on those classic pedals. The switchable gain stages and intuitive Volume/Tone control mean that the Dopamine is versatile and ready for your pedal board.

Why?

We are not trying to re-invent the wheel here. We just love fuzz because it is a whole lot of fun. We are also the first to admit that a lot of fuzz boxes can be a rather useless on the modern pedal board. The natural compression and often scooped mid frequencies can leave them redundant in the band mix. We researched the oldest and simplest fuzz designs we could find, built ourselves an inventory of NOS and new components and started work on building something that could address these issues. 

After developing a breakup characteristic and tone that we liked we started looking at the things we could do make this simple design more versatile.

We realised very early on that the Dopamine cleaned up beautifully, rolling the volume back on the guitar created some spectacular, harmonically rich driven sounds that just won't be heard from most modern fuzz pedals. Enter the Dual Stage part of our design.

The upper footswitch on the Dopamine, switches between Blue mode (Anti-D) and Red Mode (Dopamine). In Red mode, you are hearing the circuit as intended, in all its glory. In Blue mode you are hearing the exact same circuit but engaging the internal adjustable trim pot with additional treble bleed NOS Capacitor that reduces the guitar signal hitting the fuzz circuit. Probably a laughable idea in electronic terms, but a very affective way to turn one fuzz into 2 switchable sounds. 

The 250K volume pot is the last element in the chain. Reducing the volume has the added effect of rounding out the high frequencies of the fuzz circuit. When the Volume control is set to full, it's as if it's not there at all. The fuzz is shrill and saturated and hits the front of your amp hard. Really hard! As you use your pic to bring the volume back on our "no knob" set and forget volume control the tone gets progressively darker and some headroom is gained in the signal path. 

Does it doom?

Fuck yeah! Bring that volume control in and this thing get swampy. 

Does it shred?

Obviously :)

Why so big?

It's fair to say our custom enclosure is large and we know your pedalboard realestate is valuable, but....whatever.

Look at it! it's so cool and it looks like it sounds. 

Anyway..... Forget all of that, watch the vids, listen to the tones and remember to have fun. Hope you like it.