“I said to him, ‘It needs to be valve. It needs to have that sag, that compression, that you can’t necessarily get from a solid-state design’”: Adrian Thorpe on how he made Chris Buck’s awesome, tube-equipped signature pedal, Electric Lightning

Adrian Thorpe (left), the ThorpyFX Electric Lightning pedal
(Image credit: Future / Olly Curtis)

When it comes to the story of the ThorpyFX Electric Lightning, perhaps the strangest aspect is that it didn’t happen sooner. Having watched the rise of his good friend Chris Buck in Cardinal Black, while gathering plaudits for his own Brackley, UK-based pedal operation, Adrian Thorpe finally popped the question during lockdown.

“I think I’ve always had it in the back of my mind that I’d love to make something for Chris,” says the affable designer (and former major in the British Army). “So it was just a conversation we had a few years ago. Like, ‘I know your pedalboard changes all the time, but I want to make something for you that’s absolutely exemplary – what can we do?’”

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Jamie Dickson

Jamie Dickson is Editor-in-Chief of Guitarist magazine, Britain's best-selling and longest-running monthly for guitar players. He started his career at the Daily Telegraph in London, where his first assignment was interviewing blue-eyed soul legend Robert Palmer, going on to become a full-time author on music, writing for benchmark references such as 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die and Dorling Kindersley's How To Play Guitar Step By Step. He joined Guitarist in 2011 and since then it has been his privilege to interview everyone from B.B. King to St. Vincent for Guitarist's readers, while sharing insights into scores of historic guitars, from Rory Gallagher's '61 Strat to the first Martin D-28 ever made.

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