LunaStone Effects

LunaStone Effects today:

Most of the guys running LunaStone Effects today are former long time TC Electronics guys. They have tons of experience in research, design, fabrication, engineering, and management. Many of these guys are also players as well, so they totally understand what you want too.

The LunaStone Story, In The Beginning:

The roots of LunaStone began in 2011 when two friends, Morten Lunau, and studio guitarist and producer, Steen Grøntved, began jamming together and making clones of popular pedals in the living room of an apartment Steen shared with his girlfriend. Morten had little electronic experience, but Steen was working on a thesis in electronics at the Technical University of Denmark

Not content with just building clones of popular pedals, Steen wanted to see if he could improve an existing design, so he chose the ever popular TubeScreamer circuit and breadboarded it. After weeks if tweaking, both Morten and Steen like what they heard, but Steen was still not satisfied. Steen knew there were countless overdrive pedals on the market, but that most of them were virtually clones of one another. His conclusion; modifying a distortion circuit based upon diode clipping was not the answer.

Steen’s solution was to start from scratch and study one component at a time and learn how each one colored the sound. More weeks of breadboarding trial and error, led to a design that sounded awesome to both Morten and Steen. Using this initial design, and after Steen graduated from university, they began the process of building pedals with friends pitching in to help. They called the venture LunaStone, combining Luna from Morten’s last name and Stone from the Danish translation of Steen. As Steen’s circuit used no clipper diodes and employed cascaded gain stages, just like a real guitar amp, the technology was dubbed “TrueOverDrive™”. All too soon, other priorities caused Morten to withdraw from LunaStone, but Steen continued on working on his design to make it sound even better, and to make it easier to build. Word got around and some of the best dealers in Scandinavia signed on.

Enter Søren Andersen veteran guitarist with Glenn Hughes, Joe Lynn Turner, Mike Tramp, and bands of his own. Søren was searching for a replacement for his original Vox Big Ben Overdrive when he was introduced to the LunaStone Big Fella and knew he had finally found what he was looking for. Søren wanted to expand on the Big Fella’s capabilities. Working on those modifications with Steen, their ideas became Three Stage Rocket Søren Andersen signature model with TrueOverDrive™ at the core of this sonic rocket.

So what is True Overdrive™?

What is important is what it is NOT. Most distortion and overdrive guitar effects on the market use clipping diodes to create the distorting effect of the guitar signal. The TrueOverDrive™ pedals, Wise Guy, Big Fella and Three Stage Rocket, TOD1 and TOD2 use a technique that have no clipping diodes in the signal chain at all. While experimenting with diode clipping Steen heard a sound as the guitar notes rang out that he did not like. The circuit topology that employs diode clipping adds a lot of distortion to the signal by leading a huge amount of the pedal’s signal away from the signal path.

A TrueOverDrive pedal does not react in the same way as diode clipping, as the distortion is created by one stage overloading the next stage, and the next stage, just like a real guitar amp does. These serial stages deliver a lot more transparency, so you can still hear the guitar, amp and pickups, no matter how much gain you dial in. Many guitar players, who have tried our pedals, is that they sound like a hot-rodded Fender amp or a Marshall Plexi Head driven hard.