Los Campesinos! x Buzzing Bugs - Mortal Joy Controls and Sounds

www.buzzingbugsfx.com

PREORDERS LIVE 07/08/24
SHIPPING FROM 12/08/24

Buzzing Bugs Audio Devices proudly presents our newest creation, Mortal Joy, in collaboration with the UK’s “first and only emo band”, Los Campesinos! Mortal Joy is a dirt and modulation pedal designed to recreate the guitar sounds on Los Campesinos!’s incredible new album, All Hell.

Split into three sections, Mortal Joy has a dirt side, a modulation side, and in the middle, a drastic fixed-band filter, designed to emulate the sounds of a transistor radio or cigarette box amp. The dirt (DRIVE) side consists of a classic sounding transistor overdrive, with low and high gain options, providing a range of gain options from boost to distortion.

The magic really happens in the TAPE section. A rudimentary compression circuit feeds into a dynamic, warped vibrato, to create a dynamic modulator which emulates tape saturation. Two LFOs fight against each other to create random and rhythmic swells. The saturation control adapts the clipping and feedback, to distort and degrade the sound even further. The sensitivity dynamically interacts with the LFOs to achieve more warping.

Los Campesinos! had this to say about the collaboration:

“MORTAL JOY will make things sound worse in the best possible way, and we’re really proud of it.

Designing a guitar pedal really is a dream come true for us, and we’re very grateful to Buzzing Bugs for the opportunity! And because it’s such a big deal, it was actually incredibly hard deciding what this pedal should do. We spent a long time discussing ideas and looking for inspiration, and in the end we settled on something that partly tries to capture the LC! guitar sound, but also does something we’ve always wanted from a pedal.

Taking inspiration from pedals we use, as well as some of the sounds on All Hell, we designed Mortal Joy with 3 main switches: one that adds dirt, one that can create a lofi tape quality, and one that engages a drastic narrow band-pass filter. Used individually or in combination with each other, these switches can create a wide variety of big, overdriven tones, but also the really tiny, shrunken sounds of a transistor radio or one of those novelty cigarette amps, with potential for massive dynamic shifts with just one switch.

With the LFOs engaged you can also make things sound beautiful and warbly like an old cassette tape, or push them to make more extreme bendy vibrato sounds, all with an element of randomness as things bounce in and around each other. If you like the sound of old cassettes, DIY bedroom pop, warped vinyl, transistor radios or lofi bands from the 90s, or you’re just embarrassed you spent too much money hiring a fancy studio and need things to sound a little less shiny, then this is the pedal for you.

Anyway, we love it, and hope you will too.

- LC!”