Pine-Box Customs Loose Lips

“My intro to guitar pedals was in 2006 after seeing a (smaller band at the time) Manchester Orchestra play a small venue in Memphis. I was at shows every weekend for years and was never so blown away by a guitar tone. I had to know what it was. After snaking my way to the stage, I saw a very simple pedalboard housing a Boss BD-2 and an EHX Holy Grail. It was so simple, but so alive. I purchased my own secondhand Blues Driver the very next week. I have been obsessed with it ever since.

I am a firm believer that the single most important thing to guitar tone, and especially live tone, is VOLUME!!! Volume makes or breaks a tone faster than anything. I am fortunate to have a soundproof studio that I can play at the levels I want most of the time, but it seems that I am in the minority. I’ve known I’d do a BD-2 type pedal for years, but wanted to make it special as the pedal is so special to me. After several revisions and years of tinkering, I decided that the most important thing to do here was recreate the sounds that inspired me with this pedal in the first place. I wanted this pedal to capture stage volume character, stage volume feedback, and stage volume feel but, I wanted to capture this at bedroom levels. I believe that we got as close as possible.

We’re on around 11 revisions of the circuit at this point, but I would like to point out the turning point. We added a medium gain fuzzy overdrive of the single knob variety at the beginning of the circuit. This control is labeled “Boost”. The boost is adding grit, noise, and removing some of the bitter highs the bd-2 naturally has. The best part, the boost is always on. Too much info I know. Loose Lips is an extremely high gain overdrive/distortion pedal that will give you the feeling of being on a stage even when the baby is sleeping. That’s the promise we’re making.

Now, keep in mind, it can also get LOUD.”