So it’s about time for another round of ’12 Degrees of Saturation’ - featuring an updated selection and including most of the more recently released notable Mini Gain Pedals. Please note that as before - this is something of a Grey Science with simply approximated best fit positioning - as all those pedals have slightly different gain ranges, and certain ones within each selection / category can have vastly more extended range than others - and often cover more than one of the categories.

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So I’ve had a lot of people ask me to explain the reasoning and science behind my 41-strong Pedal-Chain - how it came about, and how it has evolved.

The funny thing is that when I got back into guitar in 2016 - following the passing of my two biggest  musical heroes and inspirations - Bowie and Prince - I had intended to keep things very streamlined and simple. As a teenager I struggled to recreate the sounds of my guitar heroes and kind of threw in the towel after a few years of trying and...

This is the 4th of my recent ’12 Degrees’ Series - this time moving beyond the boundaries of gain / saturation into the area of modulation. There are of course many more than the 12 modulations I have selected here - there are aliasing, ring modulation and lo-fi signal degeneration effects as well as more complex multi-combo effects, splicers and complex pattern modulators - including for instance the excellent recent Big Ear Albie. Of course the more obscure the category of ...

This is probably the most anticipated of my 12 Degrees roundups - and is a touch more complex and different to the other 2 in the series. Within each category here there can be a huge difference in character and output - for instance with Fuzz Faces going from quite mild to rather searing Meathead and Regulus VIII levels of aggression. So the gradual step up in gain per category doesn’t apply here. And because of circuit variations and differences in components and construction, each and every ...

This edition comes rather hot on the heels of the recent 12 Degrees of Overdrive version as many readers’ inquiries questioned a couple of missing categories there - which I explained would rather figure within the Distortion contingent which is present here in all its glory!

As always, these is some considerable amount of grey science at play here - best typified by the Big Muff and Rat circuits - which are both very much distortions as well as fuzz varieties. I have 3 x 12 ...

So this is one of most significant works in a while, and carries on the legacy of two of my most popular all-time articles on the 12 Degrees of Saturation - the Original that evolved in the early months of 2017, and the follow-up which materialised in September of 2018.

I obviously deal with a lot of reader inquiries pretty much on a daily basis, and one of the more popular lines of inquiry has been about overdrives. And while Josh Scott attests to the fact that there are only 5 core ...

UPDATE - Based on feedback and input I’ve tweaked some of the pedal placements - the core methodology still stands, while relatively positioning of certain pedals can be fairly nuanced!

This subject matter has become the most popular of all the different articles I’ve posted. And the original piece went up in February 2017 - so I felt it was opportune to revisit, review and revise that original methodology. I’ve tried to strip out the more branded naming conventions ...

The main reason I came up with the ’12 Degrees of Saturation’ methodology was to give me a greater insight and overview of what overdrive, fuzz and distortion pedals were out there, and which of those would best suit me. When I started the process I had really no idea of how broad this field was exactly, and really how many distinct flavours there were - particularly within the fuzz category. The ’12 Degrees’ is a generalism really, as you can break your drive pedal ...

So a little over a year ago I wrote a piece entitled - ’12 Degrees of Saturation - Key Guitar Overdrive, Fuzz and Distortion Sounds’ - which has gone on to become my most popular guitar/pedal-related blog. It touched on my central premise of covering the major overdrive, fuzz and distortion types by degree or level of gain present for that pedal type. There are so many different flavours of saturated guitar tones, that I believed they had to be categorised in some comparable fashion...