Socialist effects

Until 2010 this page featured Soviet effects only, which was quite strange. Recently we've started to receive letters from the other ex-communist countries, so we hope to see more east-european stompboxes soon.

A couple of words about Soviet FX's:
Soviet guitar effects were probably the lowest quality mass production effect units you could find. Not because of the sound, sometimes there was something funny or interesting, but because they won't function. Every Soviet effect had a warranty, which was a sertificate of purchase also giving a right to repair the unit during the certain period - usually from one to three years. You had to go to certain repair laboratory (sometimes it was really far away) and they would fix it. After the repair it was breaking again and again and again... untill you realize there's no reason to repair it.

In the late 80's there finally were some working effects called LEL, and you can still find them at Russian shops. They were noisy, output and input jacks were constantly breaking. But at least in and out sockets were regular guitar plugs, not DIN5 five-pin Soviet jacks. The fun is - the LEL company still exists, and they still make those stompboxes. The cheesy legend continues!



A nostalgic picture of the Soviet "home studio" equipment on sale. Up to down: some imporded delay unit, LEL RZ multieffect processor, Electronica E001 Equalizer, unidentified delay, SZR-100 digital reverb and a light controlling device.

Special thanks to John from ruskeys.net