Around the same time last year as Luca Romanelli announced the retirement of Mastro Valvola, my good friend Mike Vickery announced that his Vick Audio would cease pedal production too. Not many know that Mike was my Big Muff Mentor really, and I really got the full grasp on what distinguished one Big Muff variety from another - via a series of highly involved chats with Mike back in 2020.

Mike is / was one of the very best producers of Big Muff style fuzzes - with the general acceptance ...

I always get pangs of sorrow when a pedal brand retires for one reason or another. Late last year Luca Romanelli announced that he was pulling the plug on his Mastro Valvola pedal brand - which at times I have referred to as ’The Strymon of Italy’.

There are so many complications and complexities with pedal-building in general - chip sets and key components increasingly harder to source, and numerous challenges with logistics and red tape. It’s a wonder more of these don’t go to the wire. ...

I’ve been a huge fan of Magnetic Effects from my own first encounter really - where I think Christian started down this road back in 2011, with the company / brand fully formalised a little later in 2012 as far as I can tell. A wonderful legacy comes to a close - at least for the foreseeable future as Christian is supposedly in the process of moving to Japan - and running the business from there would have far too many complications.

Christian is of course not just an excellent pedal ...

It is with much sadness that we bid a fond farewell to Tom and his faithful companion Cooper - who have now retired from the Cooper FX brand as such. Tom’s protégé Dan will continue to make his new Expression Generator and Signal Path Selector utility pedals as long as there remains a demand for those.

The Cooper FX Generation Loss, Arcades and Outward though have all ceased production. While there is still some hope that the final Arcades Modular Card - based on the DigiTech Space Station ...

I am generally a huge fan of Keith Vonderhulls’ BYOC Pedal Imprint - where his Crown Jewel Multi-Drive is one of my favourite pedals of all time. Build Your Own Clone is obviously mostly a DIY Pedal Kit brand - while all the BYOC’s I have acquired to date have been fully assembled by professionals like Alchemy Audio and GearGasStore.

Big Tone Music Brewery is very much Keith’s Pro sister-range to BYOC - with a series of premium edition pedals fully and carefully assembled by hand and made ...

The above visual actually dates back to July of this year when I composed it in anticipation of what was supposed to be my very first Buffalo FX pedal acquisition - the Reticon Flanger. I had been meaning to do a run on Buffalo FX pedals eventually and the impending arrival of said rare breed of Flanger - limited to only 100 units, seemed like the perfect occasion. In anticipation of said arrival which I pre-ordered along with another 80 or so unlucky souls (less than 20 were delivered to the ...

I am a touch sad to read that after 13 great years of innovation and independent creativity - the power couple at the heart of Dwarfcraft Devices - Benjamin Hinz and Louise Woletz Hinz - have decided to move on to pastures new. It seems both have landed their dream jobs very recently - which will likely give them more stability and a better quality of life than they have hitherto enjoyed through making pedals - obviously with the current economic uncertainty it’s great to have a positive route ...

When I do my category roundups and reviews, my remits are always to be as broad as possible within the set criteria, and I typically include one or two older and discontinued models alongside the usual suspects and new releases. It is always with some degree of sadness that I witness pedal builders going out of business for one reason or another. This industry seems to have a fairly high burnout rate and with competition getting ever fiercer, it is unfortunately understandable that some ...