Buzzing Bugs Mortal Joy

The Mortal Joy is an analog dirt and modulation pedal from UK builder Buzzing Bugs Audio Devices, developed with the Cardiff band Los Campesinos! to recreate the guitar sounds on their records. It packs a discrete transistor overdrive, a fixed band filter and a tape saturation and modulation section into one box, and it sits somewhere between overdrive, filter and vibrato territory rather than being a straight dirt pedal¹².

What it is and where it came from

Guitar Pedal X's Stefan Karlsson reported on 8 August 2024 that Buzzing Bugs' Dan developed the Mortal Joy with Los Campesinos!, "replicating the core of their signature sound" in a single pedal. It is a signature lo-fi style overdrive, filter and tape saturation/modulation pedal, and the enclosure carries "a really cool grainy surface effect within the paint job too - a very handsome pedal all-round!"²

What it sounds like

Buzzing Bugs' own product page puts it bluntly: "It's gain, it's lo-fi, it's saturation, it's tape, it's all hell." Karlsson's take was that the pedal "is designed to make your guitar sound worse, in the best possible way", which gives you the flavor: this is deliberate lo-fi degradation, not clean gain¹².

The fixed band filter section is a big part of that character. Karlsson wrote that the Fixed Band Filter / Cut Footswitch "sort of emulates the sounds of a transistor radio and cigarette box amp", pulling the guitar toward small, cheap-sounding sources².

The controls: drive, filter and tape sections

The pedal combines a 3-knob Discrete Transistor Overdrive with Lo/Hi Gain Structure, a Fixed Band Filter, Tape Saturation and Dual LFO Modulation. It is organized into three sections, each with its own footswitch².

The drive section is a 3-knob discrete transistor overdrive with extended range via the Lo/Hi Gain Structure switch, so the same circuit covers lower and higher gain settings². Three footswitches, Drive, Fixed Band Filter Cut and Tape, let you bring each section in and out independently².

The modulation side is shared circuitry with another Buzzing Bugs pedal. Karlsson noted that "The LFO Modulation is the same here as on the excellent BB03 Lo-Fi Chorus but in duplicate", meaning two LFOs, A and B, each with its own Rate and Depth controls².

How it relates to the BB03 Lo-Fi Chorus

The Mortal Joy's dual LFO modulator comes from Buzzing Bugs' BB03 Lo-Fi Chorus, a pedal Karlsson described as "a proper ambience chameleon - covering classic Chorus and Vibrato, as well as more tastefully mangled lo-fi and ambient tones". On the BB03, the Age control adds Warble / Wow & Flutter, and Karlsson found it "has a beautiful sweep that gradually and increasingly disrupts the uniformity of the sound". If you know the BB03's modulation, the Mortal Joy's tape section behaves the same way, just doubled up²³.

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