Profile: I DREAM OF AND LIVE FOR GREAT GUITAR TONE

My name is Steen, I live in Copenhagen, Denmark, and I am the founder of LunaStone. First of all, I am a passionate guitarist, but I am also an engineer and something of a dreamer who constantly pursues divine guitar tone.

Decades of gigging and studio sessions taught me an important lesson: Nothing takes my focus off the music like poor sound. And even more importantly, it affects how I play. Eventually, this made me obsessed with the idea of creating the perfect overdrive pedal.

I want loads of transparency and sustain when I kick in a drive pedal. I want to hear my beloved amp and the nuances of my guitar, even at various pickup settings, through the drive. From subtle crunch to high gain, I want to be able to hear me. Because that is when I play my absolute best!

Therefore, I decided to start from scratch. I isolated every single component, played, listened, tuned and tweaked until I knew exactly how different transistors like JFETs, MOSFETs, BJTs, and a handful of classic op-amps and diodes, amplified and colored my guitar tone. Based on these intensive experiments and thorough listening sessions, I came up with a brand new design that I call TrueOverDrive™.

The most fundamental finding I made was that diode-clipping is not the answer when your goal is to create the ultimate overdrive tone. Interestingly, though, the vast majority of drive pedals are based on diode-clipping, so this is truly a major leap away from traditional designs.

In essence, My TrueOverDrive approach is based strictly on cascaded gain stages all the way from input to output. This way, it sounds and feels like a real tube amp overdriving the signal. The dynamics are similar to what you get from cranked tubes, and I can control so many tonal nuances with nothing but my fingers and the volume knob on my guitar. And most important of all, I can keep my sole focus on playing the music that I love.

But please don’t take my word for it – try it out for yourself. And have fun playing the music that you love. Because that is what it all boils down to and what drives me and my team more than anything – the love for creating, playing and living music! Show less