I’ve been meaning to do this article ever since the Witney Pedal Party event - where we lucky few who attended - were spellbound by some David Rainger magic - courtesy of a sort of combination performance and demo piece which mostly made use of the above 3 core pedals but in fact included every pedal in the range at some stage.

The Snare Trap and Drone Rainger have a real Dubby / SoundSystem dynamic to them - where in this context - this particular combination kind of renders as a sort of 3...

I’m a big fan of both Mooer’s Micro / Mini and X2 series, while I think NUX has stolen a march with its Mini TRS Stereo pedals - that Mooer has yet to answer. Mooer is still though the archetypal Mini Pedals Brand - with so many great examples in that diminutive format - including fantastic gain, modulation and utility pedals - and the formidable Micro Preamp Series.

Here we see new generations of the Drummer Drum Machine and Looper Pedals - each featuring 7 ’Parts’ in the larger more ...

This Grand Finale has been through several iterations and some very advanced Tetris-style re-arrangements. Last year I had 25 finalists, while this year I’ve upped that quotient to 40! I still would have liked to have included a few more - including the EQD Hizumitas, but in the end felt this was about right on balance. 

As I’ve already covered all of these in the very recent end of year category rundowns - this article will just be listed mentions - bar the 3 sort of specially singled out ...

And here is the turn of the combined Modulation, Pitch and Utility category - which I affectionately label ’Modutility’. Obviously as frequently mentioned -  2021 was ’Year of the Phaser’ - so 8 favourites of those here, alongside 4 choruses, 3 flangers and a couple of stand-out Amp and Cab sims. 

Some genuinely innovative pedals here - and particularly handy new expression controllers in the guise of the Chase Bliss Audio Expression Roller, and Cooper FX Expression Generator. Free the Tone...

I’ve long been a fan of DigiTech in all its guises - Mainline, DOD, and HardWire editions. Since a number of these are now discontinued I thought it a good time to review some of my favourites and nearly-weres.

In fact from this selection of 9, I own 4 - Dirty Robot, The Drop, Ventura Vibe, and Whammy Ricochet - all of which have seen fairly regular use in the pedal-chain. The Dirty Robot was my favourite Synth pedal pretty much before the Boss SY-1 and SY-200 materialised. And the Whammy ...

I actually only got to know ’Axe and You Shall Receive’ Owner / Founder Scott Hager relatively recently - while I first bought a pedal from his store (courtesy of Reverb.com) back in 2017 - my much loved ’Gold Bar’ edition of Dr Scientist’s The Elements Preamp / Drive which readers will have seen heavily featured on this site.

Earlier this year - back in March in fact - Scott and I bonded over Big Tone Music Brewery’s (BTMB) EQ’d Vintage Series...

I actually see this as an evolution and refinement of the Dedalo FX Beat from Winter NAMM 2020. Of course there is a lot more to the Snare Trap - but the core concept is roughly the same - where you tap in different percussion sounds / voicings to create a beat. I was actually waiting for an official manual to materialise for the Snare Trap in order to gain further insights, but none such seems to be materialising any time soon - so it was now as good as ever.

There are several ...

It was only natural that the Compact Format Preferred Versions feature should follow the Mini examples. Again largely inspired by the recent ’12 Degrees’ projects. 

Once more I’ve had a change of mind on some of the candidates and the preferred examples are slightly different to those previous references. Obviously new pedals have arisen, and priorities and preferences can shift fairly regularly based on prevailing mood.

That said, most of these are long-term perennial favourites which ...

And so here is the culmination of everything that happened to the pedal-chain in 2020.

There were quite a few more displacements than I had expected - all told 22 slots changed over this year - including 19 Brand New Pedals for 2020, then 3 slightly older pedals, and some incidentals.

The most significant shift, and the one that caused the most disruption was the arrival of Boss GT-1000 CORE in October. This is often the case when you bring in a big new pedal - and you need to re-...