With only three controls, this deceptively powerful pedal offers you everything from light overdrive to full on distortion with clarity and blissful grinding. A Tone On/Off switch allows you remove the Tone control from the circuit, opening up a whole new world of midrange grind. Switch it off for a simplified and straightforward attack or leave it on for a full-bodied distortion with loads of low-end with a slight natural scoop. Roll up the Sustain for wall-shaking bass notes or sustaining lead and adjust the Tone for a wild and wide frequency response from aggressive top end to low-end rumble.

Sometimes pedals can change. Parts drift, pots break, transistors go bad. They go to new homes; they get neglected and resold. Sometimes people get in there and try to revive them to their original state and sometimes they just throw whatever is laying around inside and hope it does the trick. In this case, we’re pretty sure all the above happened to the fuzz pedal that made its way to James Murphy and ended up finding a forever home with LCD Soundsystem.

This particular pedal really does have something special. It’s heavy without being too heavy, clean but not too clean. A simple set of controls yet it has an expansive array of tones that makes it very versatile on a wide variety of instruments. It has clarity when you need it and can blur all discernible lines when you don’t. It still retains the familiar foundation of the classic fuzz it was intended to be but something special happened to it over the years and it has very much grown into its own thing. 

Named after the guitar shop in which it was purchased back in 1989, the Chelsea recreates all the idiosyncrasies of the original but without the threat of total collapse. Each Chelsea is handmade at EarthQuaker Devices headquarters in always sunny Akron, Ohio, USA by a bunch of pretty nice humans and one big robot. 

TECH SPECS and FEATURES

Developed with James Murphy from the band LCD Soundsystem

A painstaking recreation of the fuzz pedal used on several of their recordings

Sustain adjusts the amount of distortion and sustain

Tone boosts treble by turning clockwise, boosts bass, and tame the top end by turning counterclockwise

Tone Bypass switch bypasses the tone control and delivers a more mid-focused response

Level controls the output volume

All-analog signal path

True bypass

Silent relay-based switching

Lifetime warranty

Current Draw: 10 mA

Input Impedance: 50 kΩ

Output Impedance: <10 kΩ

Boxed Dimensions: 5.5 x 3.25 x 3125 in.
(13.97 x 8.26 x 7.94 cm)

Out of Box Dimensions: 2.625 x 4.8125 x 2.25 in.
(6.67 x 12.22 x 5.72 cm)

Boxed Weight: 0.74 lb (335.7 g)

Out of Box Weight: 0.59 lb (265.4 g)