NAMM 2026: You can officially stop scrolling if you want to nail Billy Corgan’s electric guitar tone, because Laney Amplification has teamed up with Brian Carstens, the designer of the Smashing Pumpkins frontman’s signature tube amp, to effectively house his entire rig in a compact amp pedal, the Supergrace.
The latest in Laney’s series of Loudpedals, the Supergrace pairs the high-gain channel from Corgan’s Carstens Grace amp with the circuit of a 1969 Supergroup, offering a wholly analogue replica of Corgan’s tone – and it is so good that he used it when sitting in to play Pumpkins classic Bullet With Butterfly Wings in front of 60,000 My Chemical Romance romance fans in Chicago. That's confidence. Corgan left his "real" guitar amps behind and just rolled with this on the night.
It is all kinds of remarkable. So, too, is the origin story. Apparently Corgan had a sit down with James Laney, just walked into his office and asked him what he wanted.
“Give the average guitar player the chance to own my live rig,” he said. “My tone. The tone worth $100,000s.”
For that, Laney reached out to Carstens. You cannot get Corgan’s live tone without his input. Carstens was more than happy to oblige.
“Laney is a family-run company with an obvious passion for creating things that inspire musicians,” said Carstens. “That alignment matters. We wanted something that would be used night after night on the world’s biggest stages-not as a compromise, but as the real thing.”
The Supergrace has a lot going on but it looks user-friendly enough. Two amp channels, each with their own side of the pedal, each with their own Volume and Gain knobs. There’s a three-position Bright switch, a Dimed/Clean switch, three-band EQ plus Tone and Reverb dials.
Like many of Laney’s Black Country Customs amp-in-a-box pedals, there is a footswitchable boost, its level set by the bright red dial – red for danger. Besides the Boost footswitch, there is a footswitch for toggling between the channels and another for the reverb.
The Grace side is where you’ll access Corgan’s high-gain sound. Carstens design gave him as much saturation as he could ever need – but with definition. “It’s really solid,” Corgan notes. “There’s so much body to the notes.” The Supergroup channel, well, that gives us Tony Iommi vibes as much as it does Corgan.
Laney promises a “faithful recreation of the legendary Laney circuit that helped define early heavy metal… Gain here is organic and uncompromising. No digital modelling. No shortcuts.
“Push the input and power section and you’re rewarded with an uncompressed, wide-bandwidth response defined by clarity, punch, and visceral connection. Even the famous ‘transformer rub’ sub-note heard on countless vintage Laney recordings is preserved intact.”
Okay, you might still want an Electro-Harmonix OpAmp fuzz pedal just for that early Smashing Pumpkins vibe and because why not, right? Well, you, and anyone else with a pedalboard, is in luck; an effects loop is present and correct here, and it is transformer-isolated which should ensure a low-noise floor.
There is an aux in, headphones out, Laney’s Advanced Impulse Response (LA·IR) tech is under the hood, and the Supergrace comes pre-loaded with Corgan’s IRs. You can, of course, upload your own.
This is designed as a fly-rig but it could serve you well for recording, with USB-C connection offering latency-free performance when hooking this up to your DAW.
For more details, head over to Laney Amplification.
