Lovepedal Les Lius review

Fender tweed-style tones in a pedal

  • £139
  • €189
  • $179
The Les Luis emulates Fender 'tweed' tone, meaning Neil Young and Keef sounds a-plenty

MusicRadar Verdict

Wonderful, evocative tweed tones in a pedal.

Pros

  • +

    Convincing Tweed tones. Ease of use.

Cons

  • -

    Niche.

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The Lovepedal Les Lius is a drive pedal designed to give you vintage Fender 'tweed'-style tone. A three-way toggle switch provides tones based on late 50s Fender amps - a Deluxe and a Twin, plus a combination of the two.

"In front of our more modern Fender, the pedal yields a lovely dirty tweed sound"

A master volume knob lets you set the level with a fixed amount of drive, but engaging the right- hand footswitch brings in another gain stage to crank it up with a second knob.

In front of our more modern Fender, the pedal yields a lovely dirty tweed sound, which basically means dirtier, more urgent and mid-rich sounding.

Cranked, the Deluxe setting puts you in the mind of more compressed Neil Young territory, while the Twin mode can deliver higher-headroom Keef rhythm tones. It's very easy to use, too.

There are more versatile general double overdrives around, but if you want more old-school tweedy Fender sounds packed into your pedal, this is a no-brainer. Niche appeal, perhaps, but we like this a whole lot.

Trevor Curwen has played guitar for several decades – he's also mimed it on the UK's Top of the Pops. Much of his working life, though, has been spent behind the mixing desk, during which time he has built up a solid collection of the guitars, amps and pedals needed to cover just about any studio session. He writes pedal reviews for Guitarist and has contributed to Total Guitar, MusicRadar and Future Music among others.