So I’ve been meaning to do this article for a while, but kept putting it off - in the hope that we might see more brands materialising from this country. That has not been the case though - so now seems as good a time as any to focus on the small but mighty trifecta of Croatian brands - Dawner Prince Electronics, DryBell Musical Electronic Laboratory and Polarbear Effects.

I typically have a grid of a 9 for this style of article - so here I’ve selected my favourite 3 choices from each brand...

Jack White has done it again! - producing his most exciting pedal collaboration since the Gamechanger Plasma Coil - at least for me. A cool off-kilter Octave Fuzz combined with Analog Monophonic Synth - which delivers suitably creepy supernatural horror thriller Giallo tones!

The keywords here are texture and ambience - where this delivers soundtrack-like atmospheric tones - perfectly timed for Halloween surely!

Interestingly - even though I have the yellow limited edition Plasma Coil -...

So Fractal Audio Systems has thrown its hat in the ring with its first non-modelling device / unit - the VP4 Virtual Pedalboard Multi-FX Processor - which is quite a departure for the brand.

It’s obviously gunning for Line 6 and Eventide in particular, but also looking to knock out Boss and Strymon Workstation pedals. It has several of its own advantages, but with a number of caveats too. Overall it’s well priced for what it delivers - but for my own preferences it’s still somewhat over-...

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 ...

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’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 ...

So this has been on the cards for a while, in fact I needed to get an update of both boards featured here, as the first version I had was almost a year ago now. The idea was always to feature reader’s pedalboards - which had been somewhat noticeably / significantly inspired by this very site.

And I’m delighted that Long-term GPX friend and pedal fan Cyril Demaegd, board game designer / developer (founder of Ystari Games) and touring musician, has been somewhat ’Inspired by GPX’ since December of...

So I’ve always liked the look of the Kinotone Ribbons, in fact I wrote a very favourable review of it back in October of 2022. While I’ve yet to hit the trigger for that - I’m actually still deliberating and determining exactly where I would place it in my rig / signal chain, and which pedal it would knock out of its slot.

I was initially having a similar internal debate for the Sparks - until I spotted that one of the Factory Presets was for Harmonic Tremolo! You should all know by now how...

As narrated by John Snyder (presumably) :

"The Prismatic Wall emulates the Resonance of Sympathetic Strings, producing an effect which is somewhere between a synthesizer and reverb... The Prismatic Wall is what’s known as a Physical Modelling Synthesizer - a type of audio processor that emulates the vibrations of real objects. Here we’re using a variation on a technique called Karplus-Strong Synthesis - which uses a filtered delay line fed back upon itself to recreate the behaviour of a ...