Black Country Customs by Laney - BLACKHEATH - Boutique Bass Effect Pedal - Distortion

Ohhh, the Laney BCC-Blackheath — now this is where things get dark, gritty, and gloriously rude. If The Custard Factory is your polite, well-mannered English butler polishing your tone, the Blackheath is the leather-jacketed cousin who rides in on a motorbike, grinning, with your clean signal slung over one shoulder and a fuzzed-out snarl on the other.

What it is:

The Blackheath is Laney’s boutique bass distortion/preamp pedal, part of the Black Country Customs family. The name? It nods to Blackheath — the Midlands area where Laney’s roots run deep and where, presumably, this thing learned to growl.

It’s designed to do one thing exceptionally well: give your bass a voice that can go from subtle tube warmth to molten doom thunder. Think “studio preamp in a stompbox” with a British accent and an attitude problem.

What it’s packing

The controls are the kind of simple but deadly mix that lets you go from classy to chaos in two seconds flat:

• Drive – adds grit, grime, and righteous filth to your tone.

• Tone – fine-tunes your top-end bite or rolls it off for a rounder snarl.

• Volume – because sometimes the sound guy just needs to deal with it.

• Wet/Dry Mix – blend your clean low-end punch with distorted madness, so you never lose definition even when you’re shaking the venue foundations.

There’s also a Pre/Post switch, letting you decide whether you want that grit before or after the EQ — which is basically a “how evil do you want to sound today?” button.

And yes, it’s got Laney’s usual silent switching, solid-metal construction, and that unmistakable “boutique but built to survive a bar fight” feel.