Noise Engineering is best known for its Eurorack and Modular Synths, where the Dystorpia is its first stompbox pedal as such. It is fittingly a synthesised DSP style Fuzz / Distortion pedal - and somewhat discordant in its output profile - hence the most befitting name! Actually quite a raw and spiky sounding distortion as a whole, and pretty far removed from most everything that has come before. Certainly not your typical Guitar distortion effect!

I would say it’s something of an acquired ...

I still love my SDE-3000 EVH Delay Workstation unit - that combination of pristine digital delay and uniquely flavoured modulation just sounds superb - and you can cover EVH and Andy Timmons delay patterns with ease. A significant advantage of the SDE-3000 is the precise digital screen - where you can easily set delay values in Milliseconds or Beats Per Minute - in actual numerical integers.

While the controls of the SDE-3 are much more analogue in their nature - and need to be guided by ...

So this time around we have a slightly different take on this format - where each of these pedals has a similar outward control topology - that is to say 4 Knobs, with an additional 5th Switch or Button control.

And while the outward appearance is very similar, internally these are all quite different styles of compression circuits. Interestingly they’re listed out in alphabetical order, which just happens to coincide with a descending order of price!

There are generally considered to ...

Like for many I guess, a series of Brett Kingman demos were my gateway to Australia’s DevTech Audio. We already have a number of key David Gilmour inspired brands - including Skreddy Pedals, Buffalo FX, and Past FX, - and DevTech is now among those forerunners - navigating its own path through those classic tones.

DevTech Audio is one Terry Crawford, based in a Sydney suburb, and while Terry is a guitarist of some 30 years with an engineering background, DevTech Audio only became a going ...

And so the second (for me) in the Keeley 4-in-1 Series, combines the Tone Stacks and Drive Clipping from the Marshall BluesBreaker Overdrive, and Fulltone OCD Drive / Distortion. The colour accent and knobs here are a fetching hue of blue - otherwise identical looking to the previously reviewed Noble Screamer.

The BluesBreaker side as such has a High Frequency Filter Tone Stack, and Soft Drive Clipping, while the OCD has an Active Midrange Boost with High Frequency Roll-Off, and a Hard ...

Old Blood Noise Endeavors are ever innovative in their effects development - always adventuring where others fear to tread, and they’ve come up with a really cool new variant of fuzz here.

The main Fuzzz has 6 controls essentially - with the Fuzz Type, Filter, and Intensity varying the character and voicing of the fuzz enormously. We’ve seen this take on ’Filter’ before - which combines Input Gain with Low End frequency enhancement. While the ’Intensity’ control seems to be fairly unique ...

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...

I last did this exercise around 4 years ago now, and in that time have advanced my Rat style pedal collection to 44 units, where 29 compact editions of those are featured in this listing of 32.

From the listing I don’t yet have the NRG Effects 2024 Edition Gnawer, Oneder Red Ryder Distortion, or Walrus Audio Iron Horse. The last mentioned of those is the easiest to acquire, but I’ve not 100% made my mind up on that yet - there may be other more extended range Rats out there that I’ve yet to...

This is actually the second iteration of the Flattley Valkyries Chorus, while it’s an entirely new circuit. The previous model used the now night impossible to get CE-2 chipset of 3007 + 3101 BBD’s particularly the original Matsushita / Panasonic ones. The new circuit uses the same chip set as the later CE-3 model or 3207 + 3102 - where that pedal was typically associated with a brighter output, while the CE-2 was generally considered deeper, richer and warmer. As many BBD and Chorus experts ...