Misha Mannsoor’s Horizon Devices has quietly made its way to 4 superior modern tone enhancers. It kind of set the mould with its specialist Metal tone enhancing Precision Drive, then came its Apex High Gain Preamp, then the Flux Echo/Reverb - and here we have a very unique take on a Compressor.

Horizon Devices’ slogan is "Sound great, and be easy to use" and that theme is very clearly carried through all 4 pedals which are about as straightforward a pedals as you might expect to encounter -...

The final arrangement for the year - all the pedals that impressed the most!

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 ...

I’m obviously a huge fan of AD Hauser’s Colortone Pedals - including their cool new Cog Series Knobs and Headliners - where this ’Spring Reverb II’ is something of a misnomer as it covers far more territory than its moniker would lead you to believe. The original Colortone Spring Reverb was a much simpler 3-knob Belton Brick affair (Blend, Decay, Tone), while the new one makes use of another of those glorious custom ElectroSmith chips - which delivers 3 richly detailed Reverberation Modes with ...

The ’Shadow’ Edition I believe is only the second limited edition colourway of the Cirrus - after 2020’s blue ’Ice’ edition. The ’Shadow’ mostly has a sort of dark verdigris colourway - almost monochromatic in nature.

Controls and features I believe are identical to the Standard version. This is just a special limited colourway variant.

Controls - DELAY } Mode : Mod (Modulated Delay) / S/H (Sample/Hold Filtered Delay) / Oct (Octave Delay), Delay (Mix), Time (Delay Time), Tap-Division : ...

So May started with my posting the last of the NAMM Show stragglers, followed by an initial eclectic mix of different pedal types - while gradually leaning into ’Andy Timmons’ Month. I’ve always thought Andy to be a wonderful human being and a particularly fine journeyman guitarist. While it’s only in fairly recent years that he’s become somewhat more elevated in my affections as one of my all-time favourite guitar heroes. You will note that he did not feature in my last article on personal ...

This exercise has totally underlined just how much of a tone genius Andy Timmons is. His pedals are selected incredibly carefully and deliberately - and don’t just have that certain glorious sound about them - but beautiful dynamics, harmonics, smart guitar volume gain clean-up and an abundance of musicality. 

Andy wrings magic out of each and everyone of these pedals - and his Halo Dual Echo algorithm / preset is amazing - and can sit under anything and make it sound at least 50% percent ...

So Universal Audio has launched another batch of 3 new DSP pedals - 2 EchoVerbs essentially - the DelVerb and Galaxy - where the first is a multi-mode edition, and the latter is a multi-head Space Echo take. The 3rd here is a Dual Compressor with Preamp utility pedal - which will try to compete with BecosFX’s CompIQ Twain - which is somewhat more granular and fully analog.

When I look at the DelVerb - I can’t help thinking about Source Audio’s Collider which has many more algorithms or 5 + ...