In the wake of the recent Pedal-Chain Explainer Article - I thought it an opportune moment to do a potted snapshot history of the origin and evolution of my Pedal-Chain.

The very top image initially appeared on my original ’Tone Quest’ article (Novemeber 2016) where I set out the broader parameters of a signal chain - from start to finish!

I had certain perceptions at the start of the process which were very quickly cast by the wayside - as there’s generally far too much nonsense advice...

NOTE - this article is too large (108 videos) to work properly on Mobile devices - make sure you view on Desktop or Laptop!

This is my largest ever article - and it will unlikely be repeated in this fashion - as this takes so long to compile - and the 108 Pedals / Videos included just take a little too long to load up on the screen. In any case it’s a pretty exhaustive run-down in rough order of preference of my favourite Compact Enclosure Pedals of Each Type.

For a few here there are ...

So I’ve had a lot of people ask me to explain the reasoning and science behind my 41-strong Pedal-Chain - how it came about, and how it has evolved.

The funny thing is that when I got back into guitar in 2016 - following the passing of my two biggest  musical heroes and inspirations - Bowie and Prince - I had intended to keep things very streamlined and simple. As a teenager I struggled to recreate the sounds of my guitar heroes and kind of threw in the towel after a few years of trying and...

July has largely been a very decent month for me and culminated with the arrival of my twin new Expresso FX Dual Custom Fuzzes and my annual white whale as such - the Chase Bliss Audio Automatone Preamp MKII on this occasion.

It looks like 4 pedals failed to get over the line within the appointed time period - the longest-ranging of which is my Evil Pumpkin Modded DS-1 - which has been en-route from Kiev since June 12th and which I surely hoped should have landed by now.

My JDM Pedals ...

I would like to start by thanking Matt Knight and Joe Branton of Guitar Nerds who made this all possible and put me in contact with Steve Mac - guitarist and original member of the Australian Pink Floyd. This all stems back to the Guitar Nerds’ podcast for Friday 3rd July - an interview with Steve Mac, and the accompanying social media pictures of Steve’s home studio pedalboard - or literally ’wall of sound’.

I’m a considerable Floyd and Gilmour fan and avidly follow Björn Riis’s Gilmourish...

Readers of this blog should be well aware by now of Skindred’s Lead Guitarist and Redbeard Effects Head Honcho Mikey Demus. And while I had been very familiar with his band Skindred for a number of years - my focus didn’t shift fully to Mikey himself until he got into partnership with Adrian Thorpe and started producing his own range of signature pedals.

The first release was an exceptional take on Mikey’s core signature Orange Rockerverb 100 Amp sound - the Red Mist MKIV Distortion. Mikey ...

May was the month that several things finally slotted into place - all my missing / presumed lost USA orders finally landed as did a few other pedals which had been somewhat lingering in the wild - so May delivered a pretty decent pedal yield overall in the end. I also got to be involved in a couple of exciting up-and-coming brands - Kuro Custom Audio of Italy and MidValleyFX of USA. I’ve already published a feature on the excellent Kuro Akuma Fiery Fuzz as featured on slot #5, and hope to be ...

It’s been well over a year now since I did my first head-to-head comparison between industry standard Pedal Rental / Subscription Service - Pedal Genie of the USA, and the then fledgling Tonebuddy sort of UK equivalent. I may have been a little harsh on Tonebuddy as it was really just starting out, and its scale of operation did not really allow it to provide as close a service to Pedal Genie as it might have liked.

I’ve actually been meaning to do this update for a while -...

So I seem to have fallen into something of a Josh Smith ToneQuest phase of late. I’ve always been a fan of his core signature tone/s while not necessarily the biggest fan of his musical output per se. His first influence on me was his signature Eventide H9 Rotary preset - which settings I share in this post. I have somewhat fallen into using my own H9 mostly in Josh’s Rotary mode - with a few choice reverbs and delays too, but modulations generally coming from other parts of my pedal-chain.

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