The BIG EAR pedals "LUCK DRIVE" is a limited edition guitar/bass overdrive pedal made exclusively for the artists performing at Willie Nelson's "Luck Reunion" Festival, March 14, 2019.
These pedals were handmade in Nashville, TN by me (Grant) and my partner, Karen, along with some help from our friends!
Only 45 of these pedals exist.
This video follows the pedals through every step of the building process, and even follows Karen and me all the way to Luck, TX where the pedals were distributed amongst the artists!
The origin of the LUCK DRIVE is actually a funny story. Initially, we had planned to simply modify one of our existing overdrive circuits for this pedal. But after talking to our friend Zach Broyles of Mythos Pedals, he convinced us to let him make a modified TS-style circuit for us to check out. The pedals were going to 45 different players so we wanted it to be something that the every-player could use. And for that, a TS made sense.
Now, anyone who knows me knows I've never been fond of TubeScreamer style circuits.. But I still gave Zach a chance. I told him what I didn't like about the stock pedals, and he said, "I got this!"
Needless to say, I didn't believe him. But when he brought over a pedal for me to try, I shook my head in disbelief at how good it sounded. He had pretty much nailed it.. In fact, the only two things that I changed from Zach's circuit was a single capacitor and the taper of the gain pot!
And that was it. I became a believer. The final version of the pedal sounded fantastic and IMO it's one of the best looking pedals we've made to date. And I know this is cheesy, but we truly feel incredibly LUCK-y (sorry, dad-joke) for the opportunity to be part of such a cool thing.. so a BIG Thank You to Ellee Fletcher Durniak, Joe Durniak, and the rest of the Luck Reunion team for making that happen!
One thing to note is that we don't normally do the powder-coating on our pedal enclosures, but using our standard powder-coater would have taken longer than we had at that moment. So we ordered some clear powder-coat and had our friend AWOL help us apply it before we shipped the enclosures off to F5 Metalworks in Oklahoma for drilling and printing. Once they were shipped back we were able to finish the pedals and package them up for their trip to Texas.
So if you've ever wondered how a guitar pedal was made, this video should give you a pretty complete picture!
Thanks so much for checking out this post and video! And hey! If you liked it and want to see more from us, you can subscribe to our youtube channel here --> https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGT3vp9DFVw7aGPmjBOujGQ :)
Credits:
AWOL Pedals - Powder-coating
Eric Merrow - Video Color Correction, Grading
Eric Swanson - Card Photograph
Jacob Adams (F5 Metalworks) - Drilling, Printing
Zach Broyles (Mythos Pedals) - Circuit Design and Layout