Jam Pedals Lucydreamer Bass

I will start off with a rant:
When I tried to put the Lucydreamer on my board, I realized that the left side houses both the 9V in and the 1/4″ out. These two are so close to each other that you can’t use pancake 1/4″ jacks and have them point anywhere but the wrongest of directions. Any other configuration would have made more sense. I can see that a relatively small pedal with two foot switches has side mounted jacks, because you need some room left and right to safely operate the foot switches without pressing the one on the neighboring pedal, too.
But why on ‘s earth is it necessary to stick the 9V plug directly next to it? It’s not exactly a small pedal. It’s tall. If I were to incorporate that on my board, I’d have to use a different cable.

Rant over. This pedal is well made and looks stunning. The knobs are firm. The ‘party trick’ of the Lucy is that it has a different gain setting on the second foot switch, which can be set with an internal trim pot. And I must admit that this works well. You dial in a little grind and when you hit the second stage it’s full on blowtorch in your face.
Apart from gain and volume the other two knobs are blend and tone.

From my point of view, the Lucydreamer is boring.
The tone knob does tone. Turn it up and you have everything, dial back to loose the highs.
The blend knob blends dry and wet.
The level knob does volume.
The gain knob does gain.
That really is all there is to it.

Don’t get me wrong when I say boring. It’s good. Within the first minutes of playing, I can safely tell you that they got that second stage tuned in really well.
However, the pedal is not exactly versatile.

This impression does not fade with more use. The longer I play it, the firmer my verdict: The Lucydreamer, for my environment, is good, but boring.
Compared to the intricate dance the combo of some of the other pedals can lead, it’s rather bland.

It is very useful when you’ve got your sound dialed in and want to add two levels of dirt. The bump in volume is not as drastic as it is with many others and to my ears, it’s perfectly balanced. You basically bump in volume what you lose in the mix by having heavier distortion. The tone knob lets you take the edge off a bit and the blend knob gives you the option to go all in on the gain and retain some definition, or just have a bit of clean low end as a foundation for your dirt on top. It reacts very well to playing dynamics, all across the fingerboard and it offers a wide range of useful levels of overdrive and distortion. It reminds me a bit, because it has a similar knob layout, of the Crazy Tube Locomotive. The Locomotive – or at least the version I had, did boost the top end a bit and took away a bit of the bottom, which suited the layout very well. That’s not really happening in the Lucydreamer, though.
It is a two stage drive pedal that is capable of lower and higher gain sounds and if you’re looking for a pedal to add a little more gain with the option to add a lot more gain, but without altering tone much, look no further. The Blackstone Appliances pedal does the same thing, but with a smoother, less raspy sound and a more cultivated feel to it – the Lucydreamer roars more and roars harder.