Who The Hell Is LVE?
My obsession with guitar electron
ics began in 2001 when my 'trusty' old '66 Vibro Champ stopped working. I didn't want to go buy a new amp so I read up on vacuum tube electronic theory...a lot. I went to work on overhauling the amp and when I was finished I was rewarded with the best sounding amp (to my hears) I'd ever had. It made me wonder how that '62 Bandmaster or that Mesa Mk II might have sounded had I known anything about tweaking tube amps before I sold them off years before!
I then went to work buying non-functioning vintage
tube amps off eBay, repairing and refinishing them, and then reselling them. I went through about twenty of those before I built my first tube amp from scratch. I then proceeded to build a few tweed Champ and tweed Princeton variants, and about a dozen tweed Deluxe (5E3) variants. It was about then that I started looking into effect pedals. I performed dozens of mods and repairs on anything I could get my hands on (DS-1's,
MT-2's, SD-1's, TS-9's, BD-2's, AD-9's, Daddy-O's, Jekyll & Hyde's, and on, and on...) before I built my first pedal from scratch - a little silicon transistor boost pedal from Small Bear Electronics known as the "Tweak-O". From there I built just about every stompbox circuit I could think of to satisfy my curiosity. I began to offer pedals for sale to keep things going and ended up with a new obsession along the way - the high that comes from a grateful customer playing my pedals at a show!
The idea behind Leila has always been to build very high quality, road worthy, great sounding, vintage-based circuits and make them available to working musicians for prices at often half of that associated with their worn down vintage brethren. I'm not looking to become a famous 'booteeker', I just aim to get great sounding gear in the hands of musicians who want or need them.
I have a full time job that pays the bills and build my gadgets nights and weekends. I build pedals almost exclusively now, but still do one or two custom amp builds every year. I am also a moderator for the Delay subforum (helping DIY'ers get their delay builds working) at BYOC. Stop by and say hello sometime! You may end up with a brand new obsession and pedal board full of your own builds! Build Your Own Clone