Seymour Duncan SFX-05 Lava Box

Really seems so easy to, but there's a couple of tricks - max the level and min the gain, then max gain and dial right volume - sound is different. And there are just 2 knobs and a rumble switch, but sound is really changing depending on what settings you dial in. I consider that as an amazing feature for both live and studio cases - live you can try to adapt to the amp you have and you get almost infinite variations at studio.

I recorded a few demos recently using just Lava Box into my tube preamp's clean channel - all tracks are just Lava. Sound is great, clear, well pronounced. Really dynamic, close to tubes, really close. Warm, cuts with pride through virtually any mix - 2nd guitarist may play through fully loaded mesa and when you'll play a note of solo - you'll go up front! Puts guitar right in it's place in the mix, not touching bass, vocals or keys. For a simple pedal that's incredible!!! Can get VERY CLOSE to Queens of the stone age sound! Also Brian May, Santana-like sound is also possible.

Works great, not greedy at all to batteries.

I got it with a bit noisy volume pot - wrote 'em an e-mail asking for a replacement pot. Still waiting, about 2-3 weeks passed. No good, but I'am still waiting.

Changed my sound. Changed my playing style. I play for 13 years already and tried out lots of stuff, but never something this simple and great. Very happy to have this pedal, it's very unique, very special. Would buy a replacement on the same day if i'd lost mine.

just three knobs... pretty intuitive... no manual... very easy and pleasant to use (the learning curve is a magical mistery tour)... Nice looks...

this is to be considered: when you see and listen to the utube demos of the unit, you have to pay attention to the fact the guy is using a nice Fender Reverb amp or something (he says it)... So, the pedal is going into a very nice tube preamp, and then through a great tube power amp... So I can??t tell how much you would enjoy its sound going into a cheap solid state (kind of fuzzy) like an updated RAT or something... So it seems to be designed to "push" a nice preamp into a "really delicious realm of sounds"... If you set it before a nice unit (I use an unbeatable TECH-21 PARA DRIVER DI) you can get it working unbelievable great with any amp or mixer...

Get one now! Particularly if you have a nice amp (or preamp)... It is way cheap for what it does, and it's made by Seymour Duncan... Dp I need to say anymore?... Come on! My usual OD (Voodoo Lab "Sparkle Drive") is supossed to be a great boutique level unit, and it does deliver a lot of goods, but it goes pale in front of this one... Forget about the rest of usual OD units...

Get one!

No Idea... It seems "very" sturdy to my taste...

No idea... Hope won't need it... It's so cheap anyway.. I woul buy it many times...

Been playing for 25 years...

Seymour Duncan knows abot tone... Period...

When you use the six positions rumble swith you find just the right sound for the p/ups you are using... It sings with every pick-up I've tried (texas special, pearly gates, twank king, Fred PAF, etc.)...

I'm very happy with this purchase... And that is not easy as we all know...

It's easy enough to use but it can be hard to get a handle on exactly what it is intended as and/or exactly what tone you hope to get from it. In my opinion it could use fewer settings and parameters, read on and I'll give you an example. So don't stop reading just because you see the "5" as this is actually a very good pedal.

I wasn't sure exactly what I was going to use this pedal for when I bought it on a whim, but I found a great use for it. It is the single best piece of gear that I've ever had for the purpose of clarifying a muddy tone without exaggerating other frequencies and making it less muddy but more crappy. If you are in a dead room, or are practicing on a tube amp at bedroom levels, with the blankets and drapes etc. sucking up all the highs, it can be hard to fix the tone without adding other problems. Treble boosters can be great, but not always as a "fix-it" because they can add a nasty fizz to the mud. Boosters just make the mud louder. Overdrive pours more mud onto mud. Even EQ can become frustrating - whenever you get one band right, another one sounds wrong. This is why I often use small transistor amps for bedroom practice, or my Guitar Port. But sometimes I just need them tubes, so I hook my Weber Mass up and dime the valves. But even that cannot make the speaker bounce and move air like full power; and of course it ain't gonna do a thing for your bedroom's crappy acoustics.

Enter the Lava Box. What I found quite by accident is that it works great to tame that mud without messing up the rest of your sound. It seems to "thin out" the tone equally across the whole frequency band. And it does behave somewhat like an amp, as the website claims, which also helps to give your tube amp that tube feel when at bedroom levels or make a solid state feel more tube-like. In my situation I use it in the chain after a distotrion pedal that sounds great at high volume but muddy in my bedroom. I put the Lava Box after it; the volume set to match levels, the gain at about 25% or even less, and the "Rumble" set to 1. It's the Rumble that controls the magic. Remember when I said that the pedal had too many parameters? It's because of the Rumble. Duncan says that it's a bass roll-off control, but it's more like an on/off bass cut switch. It has a detented pot with 6 settings, but it's really only like 2; there is setting 1, and then there is 2-6. One is thin, 2-6 are increasingly fatter but they don't increase very much compared to the big difference between 1 and 2. I rarely use 3-6; I mostly use 1 as the fix for muddy tone, and sometimes 2 which works fairly well to thicken a thin tone, not as well as 1 fixes mud but still pretty good; and after finding 1 to be such a useful tool, that's a bonus! I haven't found much use for 3-6. They sound pretty much the same as 2, with slightly less bass cut as you get higher but not enough to matter. If you find yourself going past 2, or possibly 3, I would recommend that you use your amp's tone controls or an EQ at this point to fine tune the sound instead of bumping up the Rumble.

I think that the pedal would be better if instead of the Rumble switch it had a 2 position switch to go between what is now Rumble 1 and Rumble 2 plus a tone pot for fine tuning. That would make the pedal much more versatile than it is now. To me it's one of those pedals that you buy mostly for one single setting, but there is nothing wrong with that when it works for you!

No problems with it so far. I've had Twin Tube for a year or so, and an Invader pickup that has been in my RG since 1995, and they work fine. Knock on wood!

Backup? I'm lucky to have the "frontup!"

Never needed it. Knocking on wood again.

In my opinion, if you bought a Lava Box for the purpose that I mentioned (cleaning up a muddy sound without messing up other parts of your tone) and only used it that way then it would be worth what you paid and then some. Of course you will probably find more that you can do with it; and I'm sure that when I am able to get my gear out of the house and play live again then I will find some more sounds from it. But as is it's worth it to me if all I ever used it for was fixing a muddy tone in my bedroom. I would suggest to Duncan the replacing the Rumble switch with a switch and tone pot; and I'd even go as far as suggesting that they do away with the gain knob and set the pedal at medium-low gain, for ease of use and to give the pedal a specific purpose of clarifying tone. Unless you are using it strictly as a distortion box then it does not really need a gain parameter, but it's certainly not a detriment and perhaps I'll find when I next play out that I like it as a standalone distortion pedal too.

BTW - I have been playing for 28 years and own around 200 pedals, so I have a good base of sounds to compare to. I've tried just about every famous distortion-type pedal ever made before the boutique explosion, and quite a few of those too.

The Lava Box Distortion/Overdrive has three knobs - volume, gain, "rumble" and a true-bypass footswitch. The rumble knob is the tone control - a 6-position bass/mid rolloff knob that goes from really thick at six 6 to really thin at 1.

The manual explains everything,

I bought the Lava Box because I wanted an overdrive pedal without a standard tone knob (I wanted to preserve the sound of my guitar and amp). The rumble knob is a nice variation, but I basically leave it in the 6 (fullest) setting all the time.

The Lava Box is probably the most dynamic distortion pedal I've ever used. It has tons of gain (even in with the gain know way down), but it responds really well to playing dynamics. You almost don't need to turn it off, just play soft for a clean tone and really hard for a super-saturated tone. When the gain is way up and you're playing hard, the pedal definitely has a very distinctive and pronounced upper midrange, and everything can kind of sound the same. That said, I could really tell the difference between guitars and pickups through it, and it sounds totally brutal through my 1973 Fender Bassman 100 head.

It's really unique and cool-sounding pedal, but I'd definitely recommend trying it out first.

I've only owned it for a day, but it looks really reliable. It's big and made of steel, with solid knobs and switches. It has a good rubber pad on the bottom to keep it from sliding around.

The Lava Box is definitely one of the best-sounding under $100 distortion pedals I've played, I plan on using as my main distortion. I wish it was a little warmer sounding, though.

very easy ..three knobs...volume ,rumble(bass cut/add) and gain..came with a manuel but you dont need it.i am surprized that no one has reviewed this product as of today...

a variety of gain sounds...the distorion can go way over the top for me but some one else it might not be enough..i am running this pedal into a verbzilla reverb unit then into a fender tweed pro jr..was a little noisy with another effect i had but i eliminated that pedal and it's quiet now,unless you really crank the gain..but thats understandable..i play a tele thinline ,strat ,lp studio and my main guitar a rowan electric sequoia model(only 3 of this model made).
THE SOUND IS VERY GOOD THE WAY I SET IT AS I PLAY MAINLY BLUES & SOME CLASSIC (BB TO ZZ). i like the fact at different volume settings on the guitar i can clean the sound up or keep increasing (for more gain) just by the guitars volume knob...there is more than enough volume boost from this pedal..i keep it at 10 o'clock and the gain low at 9 o'clock..if playing classic rock i'll set the gain at noon and still i can clean it up with my guitars volume...this pedal is better than alot of boutique pedals and cost alot less money for the same effect..sounds like a good cranked tube amp..there is some mids/lows coming in with the rumble knob (lows,mids,all depends on what guitar)..and it works ..you dail in more lows clockwise and thin things out counter clockwise..decent simple pedal...i keep the rumble on 4 for my rowan & 5 for my strat /tele..each to his own..there is no 4 and a half which would be asking too much but thats where i would like it to be ..but i can work my tone knob on my guitar to all most get there...

i believe so ..ive had it for three months now and it's still behaving...i always have a back up (which is a duncan pickup booster pedal)just to push the amp if something failed...

yes i have dealt with duncan before with the pickup booster pedal in the past and had problems with the switch (thats when they first came out) sent it to them and they fixed it .. they sent it back and it failed again within a few months ..i was ready to take the loss but i called them before i tossed it in the river and they said send it back again..did so and it's worked ever since..good company to deal with...im sure they dont want a product out there that would hurt their reputation and as i said they made good on it...i met seymore many years ago here in st.louis and he seemed like he really wanted to put good products out and was doing things right with pickups ,etc..thats why he is successful..he didnt get there selling bad products..

i play blues,r&b,classic ..blah ,blah and this pedal serves it's purpose...i will no longer buy exspensive pedals when there are products like this that serve it's purpose..ive had alot of them ..klon,fultone,etc,and im through with that phase..these things are all relative and i dont rely on them as much as i once did..if lost i may get another...i like the fact it cleans up with the guitar and it's like a "set it ,forget it" thing..it's always on when i play on on stage..been playing many many years..good product at a fair price,does what they claim,they back their stuff up...