Another strong month for sure! A little dominated by Keeley Electronics, but some solid releases over the month - with a crazy flurry towards the end - to coincide with Europe’s largest Guitar Gear Show - Mannheim’s Guitar Summit. It seems evident now that Guitar Summit is an event I should really be at - and I will make a concerted effort to be their next year.

As it was I attended just one guitar gear event this month - EarthQuaker Devices Showcase at GuitarGuitar in Camden - where I got ...

I had become aware of Fjord Fuzz really in mid to late 2018 onwards - it took me a little while to tune into the brand - in terms of its constant prototyping and iteration - and at the time where the only official retailer for that brand was based in Sweden. It wasn’t until 2019 that I was able to get hold of my first Fjord Fuzz Pedal - where I picked up the early version of the Bifrost Fuzz-Delay on UK Reverb.com - where a UK pedal builder had either bought or exchanged a pedal with Daniel, ...

Readers of this site will know that I’ve long admired the extraordinary sound-design talents of Cohen Hartman - who’s best known through his SpiralCaster Plays Pedals YouTube Channel. In my opinion he is one of the very finest pedal demo artists there ever was. He has a way of teasing out some truly unique tones and textures from most pedals - and taking them places where others just don’t or can’t seem to venture.

He did a slew of particularly brilliant demos in the lead up to my February ...

For us proper Fjord Fuzz pedal fans - that have been there since the early days, what attracted us first to the brand - apart from the original striking Copper and Black Enclosures - were those raw and full-fat properly unfettered and wholly unlimited and unrestricted saturated fuzz sounds.

The Måne is a joyride in pedal format - where you most definitely need an expression pedal  - it’s an incomplete experience without one of those.

The controls are very simple here :

FUZZ SIDE } ...

As promised - this turned out to be quite a big month - we had 5 substantial pedal rundowns - where I hope you appreciate the time and effort put into those - they take a very long time to compile and write up! :

• Reference Collection World Odyssey [25]
• 32 Favourite Compact MIAB Distortions
• Fuzz Pedal Olympics [25]
• 32 Favourite Compact Rat Style Distortions
• Drunk Beaver 15 Favourites

I attended just one show this month - but it was a great one - the #2 Alternative Guitar Show @ Hackney...

Ryan (Clarke) of Dr Scientist is actually responsible for this article for the most part. He mis-identified my previous ’World Odyssey’ article as a Fuzz roundup - and referred to it as the ’Fuzz Pedal Olympics’ - which it really wasn’t although Fuzz as probably the biggest overall category / genre in that roundup - or 7/25. In any case I decided that for Ryan’s sake - we had better have that ’Fuzz Pedal Olympics’ proper - which this finally is! And obviously the 7 Fuzzes from the previous ...

It was quite the deliberation - deciding which image should be the cover shot for this feature - on balance I think I made there right decision by picking the very first photo of the day - where Hello Sailor Effects certainly delivers that Technicolour Rainbow which looks so appealing. Moreover I snagged a one-off pedal from that stand - a few minutes before the show was officially opened - but more of that later!

Apologies that his is a little late - it took and age to research, compile and complete - and is filled with myriad wonderful fun facts - I sincerely hope you enjoy this one - as a whole heap of work has gone into bringing it to you!

So I spent the whole weekend working on updating my pedal inventory records to figure out exactly where I was at with the Reference Collection, the last time I did that exercise was a couple of years ago. I had kind of mentally estimated that I had around 1.300...

I’m going to start this month’s roundup with a couple of conundrums that I’m still kind of wrestling with.

Firstly about my old friends at Sinvertek, whom I can’t but think that they might have jumped the shark with their latest release. It’s another spin off of the Scream Honey line - the 4th or 5th in that series. Mr Wu seems to introduce tiny improvements each year, and every other year we get a price rise too. On this occasion the offering is two pedals - supposedly both slightly different ...