With its cascading Marshall-meets-Boogie tones, this Danish dirt box is a simple, oft-transformative delight.
Powerful variety of responsive high-gain tones. Makes small amps sound huge!
Decay can sound unusual at low-gain settings. Could benefit from a more powerful EQ.
$159
LunaStone Deep Metal
lunastonepedals.com
With its oversized, comfortingly luminescent red lamp, dark finish, and diagonal control array, the latest from Danish stomp outfit LunaStone—the Deep Metal—is simple and handsomely evocative of WWII-era military electronics. And like said devices, its aesthetics belie the mayhem it unleashes. Innards consist of two PCBs that nearly run the length of the enclosure and face inward, thus concealing a view of the analog circuit's primary tone generators—a combination of clipping diodes and an op-amp driven by JFETs and BJTs (bipolar junction transistors). Designer Steen Grøntved says the goal of the Deep Metal was "an old-school heavy metal 'square sound.'" LunaStone certainly succeeded.
To test the manufacturer's claim that Deep Metal will make riffs and solos "sound huge" though a small combo, I employed an ESP LTD SN-1000FR with Fishman Fluence humbuckers and an Eastwood Sidejack Baritone DLX with Curtis Novak JM-WR pickups through a 2x10 Fender Vibrolux Reverb (sometimes along with a Fender Rumble 200 bass amp), and a 1x8 Fender Vibro Champ, in addition to Jaguar HC50 and Sound City SC30 1x12 combos.
Huge, But How?
Deep Metal's simple control set features just a soft-touch footswitch and level, tone, and gain knobs. As you might guess from its name, Deep Metal's lowest gain output is still fairly aggressive. And it's at minimum dirt that the pedal's most unusual characteristic—a slightly pulsating decay as notes fade—is most obvious. In most players' experience, this will likely feel quite unlike the response from tube amps. But the good news is that this somewhat industrial-sounding (for lack of a better term) characteristic in the decay sits well in the background—far enough to avoid being distracting. At minimum gain, Deep Metal also yields surprisingly dynamic, mellower sounds as you rein in your guitar volume.
Satisfying as the low-gain sounds can be, Deep Metal isn't about mellow. And, fortunately, as you increase the LunaStone's gain, the slight anomaly in the decay fades away, leaving in its wake a range of cascading, highly saturated classic-, thrash-, death-, and black-metal tones that cranked Marshall and Boogie fans will be at home with. To test how transformative Deep Metal can be, I began with the Fluence-outfitted ESP and my silver-panel Vibrolux Reverb set to clean tones and a middle-of-the-road EQ. Even with the cleanish Fender combo, Deep Metal facilitated everything from soaring, effortless legato runs to deep, chunking dissonance. But I was most impressed when I switched to the even smaller Vibro Champ and my Eastwood Sidejack, whose Jazzmaster Widerange pickups sounded both brutal and crystalline through the LunaStone. With a good mic, you could track an album's worth of evil through a rig like this, and the average player might never be wise to the fact that you didn't use big heads and 4x12s.
The Verdict
Apart from that odd decay at low gain, the LunaStone Deep Metal's only other slight shortcoming is its simplicity. While it delivers on the promise of making smaller amps sound big and mean, without a 2- or 3-way EQ, it's harder to get the balance of cut and body you might need when routing Deep Metal to a thumping 4x12 or both a guitar amp and a bass amp. Even so, Deep Metal puts forth a healthy range of big tones with no need for a menu or interface deep dive. For many of us that's a huge, huge plus.
Copenhagen, Denmark (March 24, 2021) -- Lunastone’s new Deep Metal is a hugely scooped distortion tailored specifically for providing powerful and classic metal tones. It is equally suited for creating wall-of-sound-like heavy guitar riffs and cutting-through-and-above-the-mix solos.
The low end is kept tight, while maintaining the ability to go really low, which translates into a massive sound - even on small combos.
“It was important to me to make Deep Metal sound huge, but at the same time be able to sound great even on smaller guitar rigs,” says Steen Grøntved, Lunastone founder and Head Engineer.
“A classic problem when searching for that juicy metal tone on a combo is that you can push the woofer so hard that it is stretched to its limits - sometimes beyond, which ultimately results in a very poor guitar tone. That problem now vaporizes with Deep Metal on the pedal board.”
Lunastone’s hallmark has traditionally been pedals that deliver super-transparent guitar tones that does not color the fundamental sound of the guitar, pickups and amp - for example, the TrueOverDrive series and the Three Stage Rocket.
Deep Metal, however, has a different purpose - it does indeed add new flavours to the table and is also a more forgiving pedal with regard to revealing every little playing technique flaw. On the contrary, Deep Metal may even enhance the overall sound of mediocre pickups.
In Short, Deep Metal creates a new path on the Lunastone quest for ultimate guitar tones.
Pricing - $159 / €149
Watch the company's video demo:
For more information:
Lunastone
Lunastone Pedals launches its first-ever digital pedal, Dynamic Delay, at The NAMM Show 2019.
Anaheim, CA (January 29, 2019) -- So far, the Danish effects pedal company has been known for its analog, tube-like overdrive and boost circuits, but now a brand new chapter is about to be opened. The Dynamic Delay is Lunastone’s first digital pedal.
2 Masterminds Behind
Lunastone founder, Steen Grøntved, has designed all of the company’s pedals up to this point – and the keyword that sums up all of his creations so far is ‘analog’.
Steen Grøntved is no stranger to digital signal processing, but to make sure that the integration-of-a-digital-algorithm debut would set the bar as high as possible, near-legendary forces were brought in. Morten Lave spent more than two decades with TC Electronic and TC Applied Technologies, developing digital signal processing tools and digital integration with hardware.
For instance, he was one of the key drivers behind the absolutely-legendary digital processing algorithms inside the M5000 and System 6000, which – along with the ‘2290’ delay unit – changed the studio recording and guitar effects processing game forever back in the late 80’s and early 90’s.
When 1 + 1 = 3
The aim for the new Dynamic Delay was not to reinvent delay processing, but to create a delay pedal that simply sounds musical and offers a tone with great definition. “Like many fellow guitarists, I had a TC-2290 in my live guitar rig back in the day,” says Steen Grøntved. “It was a bit large and noisy, at least in my rig, but it certainly had ‘something’ that I have had a hard time trying to replace, even in modern creations.
Somehow, it just sounded musical, but I can’t really put my finger on exactly what it is. It's probably the reason for why I have leaned towards analog delays for the past years, despite their obvious limitations. To create a digital delay that captures some of the analog magic has indeed been an idea that I have been kicking around for some time, and when Morten joined us, working on making that dream come true was a no-brainer.
I'm no stranger to digital electronics, but Morten has a lot more experience in that field, and I couldn't imagine any digital wizard better suited for the task than Morten for making this project happen.
The Lunastone Dynamic Delay is build around an analog mix circuit to preserve the dynamics, gain warmth and softness, but combined with the obvious advantages you gain from digital delays, including longer delay time, tap tempo, as well as a special feature: a Dynamic Delay function that is dead easy to control. An addition of Morten’s mastery, inspired by one of my favorite features of the original 2290.
In short, it’s a one-button-controlled compressor on the delay side, so when you play very actively, the delay level is kept down, and when you play softer or stop, the tail of the delay rises to the surface. The attack, release, depth and threshold parameters have been delicately fine tuned and merged into a one-button-control, which lets you spend your mental strength on playing the guitar!
The Dynamic Delay may not be for everyone, but I have no doubt that those who are into this type of delay are really going to love it!.”
For more information:
LunaStone