An interesting fact is that this collaboration almost happened several years ago, but evidently the timing wasn’t right then for various reasons. This time around though there was an added ingredient in the mix - ’Yours Truly!’ - and I was somewhat instrumental in bringing the two sides together and finally making this happen!
It’s great news for us Brits - as these Lastgasp Art Laboratories Pedals have always been somewhat beyond our reach until now.
I obviously recently covered my 9 ...
I kind of see the Tripple Threat as an update / replacement for Donner’s discontinued $69 Alpha Cruncher (High Gain Distortion + Chorus + Delay) - but now with All Analog effects - where the Distortion is likely the same / similar to the analog British-voiced (Marshall) High Gain Distortion found on the Alpha Cruncher, while the Tripple Threat’s classic Phaser is a tune-up of Donner’s analog Pearl Tremor, and the Analog Echo is a tune-up of Donner’s well loved Yellow Fall Analog Delay.
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I love that Gamechanger Audio exists and is so free and forward looking in its innovation - continuously delivering new and distinct ideas into the world of pedals. They certainly make very interesting form factors, while their pioneering spirit often kind of ignores the more practical aspects of day-to-day pedalboard management. All their units are larger than the norms - often quite substantially - which makes those pedals difficult to accommodate on a typical board. And those considerations ...
So we featured 120 pedals across the 5 Genre categories this year - as you’ve witnessed over the last 5 days, and those have been whittled and distilled down to these 27 Magnificent and Exceedingly Flavoursome candidates.
Picking out the very best of those is obviously a slightly subjective exercise while based on a series of exacting criteria - including innovation, versatility, practicality, variability, playability, quality of manufacture, quality of output and sheer enjoyment.
Here ...
And so to the final category - where competition is extremely fierce this year. No doubt some of your favourites will have missed the cut here - but hopefully this selection is fully representative of the best of the year. Obvious I lean more towards immersive stereo effects - mono doesn’t really do it for me so much - while there is a smattering of mono pedals in here too. Price, format, versatility and practicality - everything counts!
Of the 23 featured in the selection - I own around ...
So Anasounds first released their 3-knob analog-voiced delay pedal back in 2015. It rose quickly to become their best-selling pedal - and remains so to this day. One of the trickiest thing you can do - as vouched for by none other than Joshua Heath Scott - is to create a tap-tempo function for an analog style / or PT2399 delay. In fact it took Anasounds’ engineers 3 years to perfect - to the most exacting of standards. And the results of said exercise is not just the 6 control knobs, twin ...
I recall back when Suhr released their Discovery Analog Delay a couple years back - I was momentarily very excited until I realised that despite appearances it was still just another mono delay - everything else about that device was brilliant. I was keeping my fingers crossed for the eventual arrival of a Stereo Analog Delay - and Boss was first out of the gate I believe with its superb DM-101 on June 22nd - a totally genius device which I still really love - although that is alas just a M.I.S...
So back in 2019 - Reverb.com coordinated Black Friday Limited Blacked Out Editions across 17 Brands and 19 Pedals - and by and large it was a resounding success - a lot of those sold out very quickly - and overall pretty much every special pedal maid was sold in fairly short order.
I always thought it a little surprising that this exercise wasn’t repeated more often as I kind of expected it to be an annual or biennial thing following on from the 2019 event. While we’ve had to wait 4 years ...
I think it’s somewhat inevitable when discussing high-end Analog BBD Delays that we look at the context of who is active in that segment. You have Chase Bliss and Suhr who both have 4 x BBD Chip Delays - the Thermae and Discovery respectively, and then Boss’s recent monster stereo DM-101 is using twice that number at 8, where the Sending V2 makes use of a pair of them.
The Sending V2 has a maximum delay time of 1000ms, the DM-101 is 1200ms, the Discovery is 2000ms+, and the Thermae can go ...
I’m expecting this post to attract a lot of ’whataboutisms’ as many of my rundowns seem to do. While every single choice / selection here is well considered, pondered upon on and properly weighted up against pertinent criteria and then further rationalised, whittled and distilled down into a top 9 or 16 or 25 - as I always favour symmetrical grids.
If I find 18 or 19 suitable candidates - then only 16 can be featured on the grid etc. - you need to draw the line somewhere. And you can also ...