Every pedal is built by hand. NOS Soviet transistors. Rare 70s British circuits. Custom bucket-brigade designs. If it doesn't exist or went obsolete, we build it. If it's broken and worth saving, we restore it.
"I wanted a send/receive on my Blues Jr, so I built one. Then I wanted Gilmour's lost tone, so I found the schematic for his favorite pedal and built that too. Then I kept going." — Swell Audio
Each pedal exists because a specific sound didn't exist yet — or existed only in old, failing hardware that needed saving. Soviet fuzz. Rare British boost circuits. Bucket-brigade modulation. All handbuilt, all under the hood.
Not just fuzz — a midrange restoration tool that does what Gilmour's secret weapon did. Warms scooped fuzz tones, adds harmonic richness, stacks perfectly. Switchable 9/18V headroom.
MN3004-based analog flanger. Original design, not a clone. Metallic, chewy, lush character with Mistress-style dry/wet blend. Limited to fewer than 100 units, each numbered.
All NOS Soviet transistors. Old-school topology that keeps evolving. Brutal, Cold War, no apologies. Fission, Yield, Fallout — the knobs tell you everything.
Inspired by the original optical univibe topology. Chorus and Vibrato modes. Swirling, organic, consciousness-expanding. The kind of modulation that makes you stop playing and just listen.
Two new originals. Designed as a pair. Inspired by the optimism of the atomic age — when the future still looked like chrome and geometry.
A 2-46 phaser built from scratch. Art Deco rocket drifting through space. Sweeping, orbital, unhurried. The kind of phaser that makes you stop playing and just listen.
2-voice chorus — super wet vs tight, and every blend between. Art Deco nuclear reactor. An original design. Nothing on the market does exactly this, which is exactly why it exists.
Your dad had a pedal that vanished. There's a sound on a record nobody can recreate. A circuit got discontinued and the clones don't cut it. If you know where a lost tone is hiding, tell us the story.
We'll investigate. If it's genuinely lost — not just hard to dial in — and if it's worth building, we'll build it. You'll be featured on the product page and get a discount on the pedal.
Vintage gear restoration is all under the hood — caps, transistors, burnt boards, failed traces. Not cosmetics. The soul of the thing is what matters.
Electrolytics, film caps, tantalums — everything gets tested and replaced with quality components. Old caps are where tone goes to die slowly. We fix that.
Germanium, silicon, NOS Soviet — we source and match period-correct or sonically superior replacements. The circuit gets what it was designed around.
Damaged traces, lifted pads, heat damage. If the board is salvageable, we salvage it. We'll tell you honestly when it isn't.
Bias work, send/return loops, tone stack mods, output transformer issues. Started doing this on a Blues Jr. Still doing it, just on more interesting amps now.
Rare British and American circuits from the 60s and 70s — if it's old and important, we know the topology. We've been inside most of them already.
It started simply enough — a Blues Jr that needed a send/return loop and the attitude of "fine, I'll do it myself." One successful mod led to another question: how does Gilmour get those sounds?
The answer was a rabbit hole. Almost all of his original tone came from circuits that had gone obsolete. The rare British boost he loved — his all-time favorite pedal — wasn't in production. But someone had a schematic.
So one was built. Then modded. Then modded again. The Ace of Spades came out the other side — something rooted in that original circuit but pushed into new territory with switchable headroom and a proper buffer stage.
That curiosity never stopped. Each pedal in the Swell lineup exists because a specific sound or feel didn't exist yet — or existed only in old, failing, hard-to-find hardware that needed saving.
That's also why restoration is part of this. The same mind that traces a 1960s circuit to understand it will also repair one. It's the same work.