Sometimes it feels like the world is giving birth to at least one drive pedal per day, but a quick glance at the new Tubesteader Lightkeeper – now updated to a compact V2 – was enough to understand that this is no regular overdrive.
First of all, this hand-built baby is inspired by the legendary tone of the Dumble amps (the clean channel), and not only it’s fully analog but it’s got a vacuum tube in it! An ECC83/c operating at 250VDC high voltage delivers that classic warm, rich tone with gentle and natural compression. It was voiced after the so-called “High Plate” design of the Dumble Overdrive Special.
Turning up the Gain knob gradually adds harmonic complexity and saturation to your signal, always maintaining your performance’s dynamics, peaking with a “fatter” but still clear and responsive overdrive at maximum settings.
A series of controls allow you to sculpt and boost your tone:
- Three EQ knobs (Bass, Mid, High)
- When set to “On,” the Mid toggle boosts the mids and also shifts the frequency of the pedal. This mid boost can also be assigned to the left footswitch when in FC position.
- The Boost toggle works the same way but raises the overall volume. That way the left footswitch can be assigned to either or both boosts, which is an ingenious tweak.
V2 fits all these controls in a smaller, compact enclosure.
This is a very impressive release by a Montreal-based company that specializes, as evident from their namesake, in releasing pedals with tube-driven circuits. We added it to our article about the Best Dumble-Style Pedals, check out the videos of it, below.
Videos of the Tubesteader Lightkeeper V1
The Lightkeeper is a tube based, all-analog boost/overdrive pedal, designed to deliver that ‘tube-feel’ to any amp, house system, or recording interface.
Inspired by Dumble’s legendary clean channel sound with lush dynamics and touch-sensitive sound we crave. It’s a portable tone palette that’s perfect for enhancing the flat-sounding amps or tucking in your case for jam sessions.
Sculpt your base tone from crisp clean to an edge of breakup while reserving the footswitch boost/mid-punch for solos, thanks to the 3-way Mid and Boost footswitchable controls.
The Lightkeeper operates as a pure analog, Class A audio pre-amp offering high fidelity sound without semi-conductor or DSP in the signal path. It features a genuine ECC83/12AX7 vacuum tube operating at 250VDC high voltage and delivers a warm, rich tone with gentle and natural compression
