Empty Head Effects The Lover

What it is and what it does to your sound

The Lover sits in the overlap between drive and fuzz. Delicious Audio describes it as a two-stage transistor true-bypass drive pedal², while Guitar Pedal X characterizes its output as "mostly a fuzzy-drive in its output profile - with a sort of proto fuzz sound at its peak"³. In practice that means low gain settings give you a textured, still-transparent drive, and pushing the gain moves the pedal toward a saturated, proto-fuzz character rather than a smooth overdrive.

The two-stage design is the heart of it. Each stage is a single transistor: one 2N4124 and one 2N2222A, with four silicon diodes handling the clipping³. That topology is closer to the old transistor fuzzes than to a modern diode-clipped overdrive, and it is why the pedal responds so strongly to the guitar's volume knob. As Karlsson put it, "this 2-Transistor format cleans up amazingly well courtesy of your guitar volume control"³. Roll the guitar back and the fuzz recedes into drive; open it up and the saturation returns.

The controls: Heart, output, and the Compassion switch

The circuit gives you three rotary controls and three toggle switches, plus internal trimmers for deeper tweaking¹.

The Compassion switch is the personality control. Karlsson found it "sounds sharper and more clipped when to the left, and more open and searing to the right"³. Left gives a tighter, more clipped attack; right opens the bias up for a more searing, fuzz-forward voice.

Both filter toggles have internal trim pots behind them, so you can set where each filter actually sits rather than living with a fixed frequency¹. Guitar Pedal X measured the ranges:

• Low-pass filter (A Veil): 24kHz on the left down to 1.4kHz on the right, with the default set mid-way around 11.3kHz³
• High-pass filter (Loss): 23kHz on the left down to 120Hz on the right, with the default at the least cut, 23kHz³

That is a wide sweep on the high-pass side, from essentially full-range at 23kHz down to a genuinely thin 120Hz, which makes the trimmers a real voicing tool for matching the pedal to a bright single-coil or a dark humbucker rig³.

From the landscape V1 to the portrait V2

The Lover began in what Guitar Pedal X calls a Zvex-style landscape format, a horizontal enclosure, at a time when nearly every other builder positioned pedals vertically in portrait mode³. The V2, released on 28 April 2026, keeps the core circuitry and values unchanged and moves to a portrait enclosure with the jacks relocated to the top edge, a change Karlsson had himself suggested for a more elegant control layout³. The V2 is priced at €195 on the Empty Head Effects webstore³.

If you already know a V1 unit, the sound is the same design; the V2 is a rehousing and refinement, not a circuit revision³.

Power and bypass

The Lover runs on 9V DC, center negative, and draws 100mA¹. It uses true-bypass switching, so the pedal is fully out of the signal path when disengaged¹.

What reviewers said

Guitar Pedal X's review of the V2, published 28 April 2026, is the fullest published assessment. Karlsson's verdict:

The V2's coverage also detailed its internal trimmers, with the LPF adjustable from 24kHz on the left down to 1.4kHz on the right, and the HPF from 23kHz down to 120Hz, set by default mid-way for the LPF (A Veil) around 11.3kHz and at the least cut for the HPF (Loss)³. The same review noted the Compassion switch (Input Gain) sounds sharper and more clipped to the left and more open and searing to the right, and reported the Lover V2 2-Stage Transistor Drive at €195 on the Empty Head Effects Webstore³.

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