WhY I Made This: LA HABRA
The world is full of Tube Screamer and Rat clones. I love them. I use them. But at the moment, there is absolutely no part of me interested in building them. The LA HABRA Hard Clipper came about fairly organically, filled a void on my board, and is a shining example of the simple, analog goodness I’m going for at OC Pedal Co.
Let’s start with the pedal’s conception. In either late 2024 or early 2025, Jeff Schroeder, musical genius and former Smashing Pumpkins guitarist, reached out to see if I could build him a custom version of a vintage circuit he loved. It took me a few weeks, but I eventually completed the build and sent the units off. While Jeff’s test circuit was still laid out on my breadboard, I decided to, well, go full Victor Frankenstein.
I started tinkering and found that changing a few things around, using a different op-amp, increasing and decreasing capacitor values, and completely removing resistance in certain spots (see no gain knob) gave me a really nice, higher gain sound with a low noise floor. The circuit sounded cool on its own, but I really found my groove with it once I integrated it onto my board during the testing phase.
Photo Credit: Austin Jett
I’m a pedal stacking enthusiast, and the LA HABRA wound up solving an issue I had been dealing with in my rig. I always aim for that 80s high gain sound for solo tones. The problem is I tend to like lower gain amps, and I obviously could not get there without stacking three or more overdrives on top of each other. In theory this isn’t an issue but practically it would result in raising the noise floor and completely contaminating my sound. The LA HABRA fixed that. It was hot enough and articulate enough to get me where I needed to be when combined with just one lower gain overdrive placed before it, instead of relying on multiple stacked drive pedals. Instant 80’s!
Another side benefit was now that the extra overdrives and distortions were off my board, I had more space for the fun stuff like modulation and delay.
NO GAIN KNOB
Why give you the option? The pot sounded like trash so I just took it away and gave you clipping selection. Think of me as your tonal concierge, you’re welcome, no need to tip.