November has been a crazy month! With such a flurry of activity from around the middle of the month onwards. So many companies took full advantage of Black Friday promotions - and the smartest of them started early, and extended their campaign through to the 2nd or 6th of December - in order to be able to take advantage of 2 pay packets!

If you started your Black Friday sales with just a week to go or less - then alas you’re bang out of touch with the new paradigm shift. The early bird ...

I’ve always loved Mini Pedals - particularly those from Decibelics, Function F(X) / Pickdropper, Mooer and One Control, the latter two brands making up most of my mini pedal collection to-date - in fact you could probably add Wampler to the original list of 4 too - Brian makes some very fine minis - oh, as does MXR, and Ibanez even.. While for me at one time - Mooer was in the lead with 10 candidates in my mini pedal collection, while this latest exercise has pushed OneControl to the top of ...

I’ve just recently covered the phenomenal Tavysh HARM Multi-Gain pedal, and thought I should look at which similarly potent multi-gain pedals I had in the reference collection. In fact while doing the preliminary for this I realised I hadn’t yet acquired the All-Pedal Devil’s Triad Essentials - which landed around a fortnight ago. I had to go to Thomann, as there were none available in the UK at the time. I actually really like using Thomann - it takes a little longer to get packages from there...

When I first glimpsed the HARM pedal - it very much appeared to me to be the full-fat embodiment of my ’12 Degrees  of Saturation’ Methodology. Now that I’ve been road-testing it for 3 weeks, I can absolutely vouch for its potency, versatility, and prowess - its range of coverage is extraordinary!

This is the one compact pedal that can pretty much cover all your gain needs. That’s not to say it wholly accurately 100% replicates every gain pedal, while it most definitely gets well beyond the...

I’m somewhat bemused with YouTube demoers making lofty proclamations wholly without context, and without reference to any other Dumble-style pedals - as if Universal Audio had invented something entirely new here. There are currently 35 demos out there on YouTube for this one pedal - where pretty much in unison those reviewers are proclaiming the Enigmatic as the best thing since sliced bread!

No mention of the incredible analog Tanabe Dumkudo/Zenkudo, Demon Pedals Kondo-Shifuku, or Custom ...

Supposedly I’m one of the inspirations for this particular edition, which was simply based on my suggesting a more compact version of this excellent all-rounder original Parasite JFET Overdrive. I don’t take too much credit though - as my good friend AD Hauser did all the heavy lifting here!

I enormously enjoyed the partial collaboration on the new generation of Colortone knobs, and the creation of their ’Headliner’ silicon caps - for extra hi-vis legibility. I certainly had some say in ...

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...

So we now have a limited edition of the Unobtanium Klon + Dumble Dual Channel Overdrive in a different ’Raw’ Colourway, but more importantly with changes made to each of the 2 Channels!

On the Klon side we get a different ’Mod’ option on the Clipping / Compression switch. Were CTC’s Christos found that the NOS Mullard/Valvo OC45 germanium transistor paired exceptionally well with that circuit and generated even greater depths of breakup character.

While on the Dumble side that Chanel ...

Readers will be aware that I recently added 2 further Dumble style Overdrives to the reference collection. First the Menatone Dumbstruck V2, and then most recently the superb Tanabe Zenkudo.

I’ve decided that I’m at a point now where this selection is fully representative of this genre, of course I do have a few more targets in this category, while I feel I now have most of the major top-tier contenders. Notably missing here is Robben Ford’s evidently much loved Lovepedal / Hermida Zen ...