Heather Brown Electronicals Spirit in the Sky

The Spirit in the Sky is a fuzz and tremolo pedal from New Jersey builder Heather Brown Electronicals, and it was the builder's third release¹. It puts three things in one enclosure: a Ram's Head-style fuzz placed in parallel with a JFET boost, plus an analog optical tremolo, with a clean blend to mix against¹.

Delicious Audio's Paolo De Gregorio summed up why it resists easy labeling:

How the circuit is put together

The core of the pedal is a parallel design: a Ram's Head-style fuzz sits alongside a JFET boost rather than one feeding the other, and the Blend knob dials in the amount of fuzz or clean signal¹³. The Ram's Head reference points to the classic mid-1970s Big Muff variant, known among players as a warmer, smoother take on that circuit. On top of that parallel pair sits an analog optical tremolo, the lamp-and-photocell approach used in vintage amplifiers, whose position in the chain you choose yourself¹.

Pedal of the Day's reviewer found the combination opened up a wide range of textures, "providing all sorts of dynamic wobbles, pulsing chops and gorgeous ambient textures"³.

The controls

The knob set splits cleanly between the two sides, with a Blend and a Master Volume shared by the whole pedal³.

Two stomp switches handle bypass: a Tremolo on/off switch and a Master on/off switch, and the Master switch affects the tremolo as well, so the tremolo only runs when the pedal itself is engaged¹.

The Shape control is worth a note for players new to tremolo: a square wave gives a hard, choppy on/off gate, while a sine wave gives the smooth, surf-style swell, and everything between is available on the dial².

The Flow toggle: tremolo before or after the fuzz

The pedal's most distinctive control is the Flow toggle. It A/Bs the tremolo to either post-fuzz or post-boost, which in practice means choosing whether the tremolo modulates the fuzzed signal or the clean, boosted signal¹². Pedal of the Day describes the same choice in plainer terms: the Flow toggle lets you choose whether the tremolo is applied to the clean or the fuzz signal³.

That choice matters. Tremolo after fuzz chops the sustained fuzz the way players hear on classic recordings; tremolo on the clean path leaves the fuzz untouched and wobbles only the blended-in dry signal, a subtler and more ambient result.

Suggested settings: Subtle Weird, Ambient Pulse and Lighter Fluid

Inside the box, builder Heather Brown suggests named control combinations, including Subtle Weird, Ambient Pulse and Lighter Fluid³. These are starting points rather than switchable modes: each is a set of knob positions for a particular character, from a textured, understated wobble to a pulsing ambient chop. Players who like to dial in from a known good spot get three of them to work from.

On bass, and where it came from

Delicious Audio reports the pedal "sounds great on bass and Rhodes too," so bass players get a usable tool here, helped by the Blend control keeping clean low end in the mix¹.

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