I played bass in a band in high school, but because I was 16, I wasn’t familiar with the concept of discretion and constantly played through a cheap fuzz pedal with all the knobs turned all the way up. My band mates would complain that I was too loud and all the songs lost their fullness without the low end… but I wanted so badly to be heard in the forefront! If I had been playing through the El Rey Lucha Fuzz, all my problems w
ould have been avoided.
Three knobs control the Lucha Fuzz: Gain (grapple), Tone (headlock), and Volume (pile driver). With just those three parameters, you can get an immense amount of color out of this thing,(concise simplicity will never fail to impress me.) Max the grapple knob with the headlock knob all the way down for soulful darkness that growls menacingly, reverse those parameters for impressive dry grit, or find the proper mix of the two in between the two extremes.
Most importantly,The Lucha Fuzz does not compromise the low end of your sound. This is the pedal you NEED for all of those Boris covers you’ve been meaning to record but were too worried about dishonoring Flood III to do it. This thing puts a huge amount of force behind your guitar but keeps the body full and warm without any volume drops and without any presence drops.
The Lucha Fuzz is a fun play and it’s incredibly easy to figure out and unlock its potential. My only gripe is that it doesn’t push forward the concept of the fuzz pedal, as a whole, at all. It builds upon the pre-existing format without any fundamental innovation, but its approach to the fuzz sound is extremely tactful and mindful of the problems with fuzz that desperately needed to be addressed. High school sophomore me needed this one badly. – Eric Werner
