May Birthdays 
I came across this pedal on the net by accident the other day and was immediately interested. This is because in one of my bands I have used a lot of Lo-Fi type sounds on the original recordings and was in the process of wondering how to reproduce them live. I bought the LF7 and having played with it for a couple of days, I thought some of what it does it may be of interest to people here. It's certainly an interesting concept to buy a pedal that deliberately reduces the quality of your guitar sound but it actually has a multitude of uses.
It has four knobs in the usual place across the top and a switch that tailors the effect to suit guitar, drums or vocals. Cleverly, the vocal setting also boosts the input level to be right for a microphone and the obvious use here is to simulate a megaphone. The first knob is 'Drive' and this adds a degree of distortion to the sound , although not in the sense that a distortion pedal does. This distortion is more along the lines of tape overload and can also sound a little like the preamp distortion on a Vox AC. At the more extreme EQ settings it's intended to help with the simulation of a telephone or AM radio sound. The treble and bass controls determine the cut-off frequency of preset filters and do not boost in the way normal tone controls do.
The LF7 does these FX sounds very well and they can be really effective when you switch between the degraded sound on say, the intro of a number - and then back to normal when the whole band comes in, or as a way of making the breakdown section of a song really different. Also available are some great Portishead or Marc Ribot type sounds, especially when combined with tremolo. It's for these type of uses that I bought it and I'm very pleased with the way it performs. The key to these types of sounds is that they shouldn't sound just 'nasty' but that they should have character and they fortunately do. However, I've found that at the more subtle settings it has uses I hadn't thought of - and it's these that might be more relevant to people here...
The LF7 is also great for getting close to some great '60's type guitar sounds like Link Wray, The Sonics or British amp sounds like The Kinks or The Beatles. These are sounds that are not going to come easily out of a JBL equipped Fender set-up and although I haven't tried the pedal with specifically that, I can imagine it doing a pretty good job. It's also great for keeping a sound in a frequency band so that it doesn't get lost under other instruments - and it can make a lead or solo part part stand out clearly from the backing without getting involved in a volume war with the other musicians (particularly useful if you have a keyboard player). Conversely, it can also make a background part in an arrangement clearly audible whilst still being fairly quiet. It will be interesting to try it on the insert points during a mix where I can see it helping to create space. Obviously, there are other ways of getting all these sounds using different amps etc. but the key with the LF7 is that you can just switch to it as a sudden contrast.
I like it a lot and I may even buy a second one to get the two settings I like the most on tap. It's definitely worth trying if any of these uses sound like your type of thing. I will do a demo clip for Youtube and will bump this thread when I have.
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