REVIEW: Letts Dirt-Box (DB) Guitar Distortion Pedal

When Letts Basses offered us the chance to road test some of their hand-crafted kit for a blog post, The Boy nearly snapped their hand off. How often do you get offered a new guitar and pedal combo to play with? Not very often in this house, I can tell you.

Now, I’m no guitarist, although I did post a handy guide on how to blag talking to musicians last year. The Boy set about testing out the guitar and pedal with gusto though, as you can imagine. Unfortunately for you lot, the guitar was sold WAYYY before I had chance to write about it, but if you want to pick yourself up a piece of custom, handmade gold for a very reasonable price then I recommend keeping an eye on the Letts online shop.

They are also producing lots more pick-ups and custom knobs (fnarr) so keep an eye on the Facebook page. Excitingly, after a year out from commissions, they have also just announced that they will consider a limited number of new projects, so if you’ve always had your heart set on an 8 string bass with beautiful hard wood body, get in touch.

Anyway, the FX unit that we tried is the Dirt-box guitar distortion. This fuzz pedal is a hand built, boutique product, but has affinities with the sort of sound quality you would get from a tubescreamer style stomp box, to give you an easy comparison.

It has gain, volume and tone adjusters and you can get an interesting amount of range from it. The Boy has asked me to emphasise that it was very early in the morning when I demanded to film him playing with it, so apologies for any misrepresentation of his guitar prowess! I did just tell him to do some twiddling. Which is of course a technical term.

The Boy informs me that this would be an excellent addition to anyone looking for a stoner rock or even a doom style, giving a robust fuzz sound that will hold up well in the mix, however it also has the flexibility to be most excellent when one is having a bash at the old classic rock also. An FX pedal to suit all seasons as it were.

You can pick yourself up a Letts-Motherload custom pedal and pick-ups from their online shop. Proudly made in Leicester.