Lovetone Meatball

The Lovetone Meatball is a British-made analog envelope filter and the first of Lovetone's big-box modulation effects¹²³. An envelope filter sets a filter's frequency from the dynamics of your playing, so picking harder sweeps the filter further; the Meatball takes that idea and builds one of the most feature-heavy versions of it ever put in a pedal. Its filter is a resonant low-pass design with selectable bandpass and high-pass options, which Lovetone says provides a broad palette of textures, from subtle, vowel-like tone shifts to wild, synth-like sweeps².

A tweaked Mu-Tron III

The Meatball's starting point is the Mu-Tron III, which Guitar World credits to designers Mike Beigel and Aaron Newman and which Premier Guitar calls the first voltage-triggered filter effect⁶⁷. Aion FX describes the Meatball as "a heavily tweaked version of the very first commercial envelope filter pedal, the Mu-tron III"⁴. On top of that core it adds the features below⁴:

• A clean blend
• Attack and decay controls
• Two extra range modes in between the Hi and Lo settings
• Two expression controls
• An effects loop

GuitarPlayer's writers Rod Brakes and Art Thompson summed up the control set this way: "Featuring four frequency ranges, multiple filter types (with depth and resonance controls), attack and decay knobs, a trigger section, and an effects loop"¹. The filter itself is a resonant low-pass design with selectable bandpass and high-pass options, which gearnews says provides "a broad palette of textures, from subtle, vowel-like tone shifts to wild, synth-like sweeps"². GuitarPlayer noted that "the British-made Meatball can do the funky-filter thing as readily as it dishes up animal snorts, bird whistles, insect" sounds and more¹.

The effects loop is a big part of what separates the Meatball from a standard envelope filter. As JHS Pedals puts it: "You've also got effects loops that let you put other effects into it, so they're triggered into the envelope, expression" controls add to it⁵. Putting a fuzz or octave pedal inside the loop means the envelope reacts to that signal, opening up sounds a plain filter cannot reach.

History

The Meatball was the first of Lovetone's big-box modulation effects, a line of British-made pedals known for their depth of control⁴. Its filter is a resonant low-pass design with selectable bandpass and high-pass options, providing a broad palette of textures, from subtle, vowel-like tone shifts to wild, synth-like sweeps². That breadth is what reviewers kept coming back to: as one put it, "even with the vintage price, you get fantastic bang for your buck with this pedal," calling the Meatball really versatile and extensive⁵.

What reviewers and players made of it

JHS Pedals' history of the brand is generous about the Meatball's value: "even with the vintage price, you get fantastic bang for your buck with this pedal," calling it really versatile and extensive⁵. Delicious Audio's Paolo De Gregorio described it as "a beast of a filter pedal selling for well over $1,500"⁸. RockBoard's pedal encyclopedia marks the original as rare³.

The Behringer Meatball and other descendants

Because the original is rare and expensive, the design has been revisited several times³⁸:

Behringer's product page notes you can "use an expression pedal for manual sweeps"⁹. For players who want the original Mu-Tron flavor rather than the Meatball's expansion of it, the Mu-Tron III itself remains the reference point⁴.

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