9 of the Best Mythos Pedals

It turns out that I’m quite the fan of Zach Broyles and his many circuit confections. And despite having only been officially properly in business for a handful of years now, Zach’s output is really rather prolific and a number of his classic circuits are already discontinued. Most of you will know his story of how he started dabbling with pedals while working at celebrated guitar hangout Carter Vintage. He got to a stage where he had established enough contacts with clients and local guitar heroes and struck out fully on his own sort of around 2016/17 - later to be joined by his wife Morgan in sharing the build and assembly duties.

Zach encountered both Joey Landreth and Rob Chapman relatively early on into his then fledgling pedal business - which led him to associations with Andertons and Riffy City Music also which kind of gave him a spring board to success. And a number of appealing collaborations and signature pedals along the way.

I was fortunate to have had an in-depth conversation with Zach at the still relatively recent Birmingham Guitar Show - back on February 29th this year - in fact my last outside event before I went into Coronavirus isolation / social distancing. Zach had then just launched the Lark and Susmaryosep signature pedals for Rhett Shull and RJ Ronquillo respectively - two more YouTube guitar heroes that I follow. In fact I was familiar with most of the celebrated Mythos Pedal advocates before making the connection back to Zach. These are some of the most formidable and influential personalities in this industry and they have all collaborated together at various times to great effect. For me the Lark and Susmaryosep are more for stand-alone fly-rig purposes really, and not so compatible with my own pedal-chain - so those alas don’t feature in my favourite 9 pedals listed here.

I have acquired just 2 of these to date - each sort of associated with Joey Landreth - first the Golden Fleece Mini Overdrive/Fuzz, and then the High Road Mini Gated Fuzz - both exceptionally versatile and touch-sensitive fuzzes at their heart. I really should have more of Mythos in my collection by now - but they are ever in rare supply and there are only a handful of dealers in Europe, and it doesn’t help that Deluxe Guitars of Australia does not ship abroad.

Zach has obviously been prioritising his two new signature pedal launches, and as a consequence pretty much everything else is sold out near enough everywhere at the moment (there are just 4 pedals listed on Reverb.com). In fact at my nearest and only UK dealer Andertons there is only a single Mythos pedal in stock - the diminutive Cestus Mini Clean Boost. For some reason my most-wanted - the Chupacabra has not been available at Andertons for a couple of years now. I’m of course a big Billy Gibbons fan - and Zach has captured the sound of the early ZZ Top albums within the circuit and output of the Chupacabra. My second most wanted is Zach’s take on the Prescription Electronics Clean Octave Boost - or the Argo Octave Fuzz. Based on another of my guitar heroes - one Josh Smith I’ve been convinced I also need the Argonaut Mini Upper Octave for more occasional use.

I’ve long listed the Erlking as my favourite take on the Nobels ODR-1 circuit. The Runestone was a Riff City / Andertons limited edition - a sort of beefed up Daedalus or Blues Breaker style circuit. And finally last but not least is Chappers’ signature Titan - a beefed up variation of Zach’s Mjolnir Klone style circuit - with additional clipping and fatness options. Ah - I forgot to mention the AU 79 variant of the Golden Fleece - a somewhat softer lower gain derivative of the core Golden Fleece circuit - made as a special / limited edition for Mass Street Music - which though seems to have found its way into a lot of my British colleagues’ hands - I of course need that to complete my Mythos Mini Fuzz Trifecta!

All of these are incredibly hard to get at the moment and probably for the immediate foreseeable future - until Zach gets on top of his backlog. Obviously there are 3 discontinued pedals in my listing - the Erlking, Runestone and Titan - which will be very difficult to track down. I’ve already set up automated feed trackers for those on Reverb.com - in fact I had the opportunity twice to claim an Erlking in the past year - but I was distracted on other priority missions at the time!

As I keep saying - you really can’t collect them all - there are so many different factors involved, and it does not necessarily help if there is limited supply in your particular corner of the world. I discovered one remaining Chupacabra in the wild - at Deluxe Guitars in Australia - but they have already admonished me several times that they don’t / won’t ship outside of Australia - how very insular of them!

I will persevere though as at least 4 of these should be relatively easily within my grasp - and then I just need to be lucky with the remainder. I do very much want all of those here I don’t yet have - no doubt some will take a little longer to land. I have reached out a couple of times to Zach - but he’s understandably busy at the moment and thus far not able to reply. In any case I hope to have a lot more of these in the collection in the not too distant future.

Here follow some further details about each :