I had long since identified 3 Caroline Guitar Co pedals that I really wanted, but as is sometimes the case, I wanted special editions of each - and I was just waiting for the right ones to materialise!

I’ve already covered 2 pedals from that Trifecta - my white-knob CCCP edition of the Hawaiian Pizza Fuzz-Drive, and the recent Zero Edition of the Wave Cannon Superdistorter.

This article is really mostly about the third of my selection - where the Germanium edition of the Shigeharu ...

Here it’s the turn of the new distortion pedals this year. Where I own all but 7 here :

• Crazy Tube Circuits Heatseeker Enhanced Full Stack Marshall style Preamp
• God City Instruments Brutalist Distortion
• Krozz Devices RoyalBreaker Extended Rat style Distortion
• Noise Engineering Dystorpia Fuzz/Distortion
• Soldano Super Lead Overdrive Plus
• UAFX Anti 1992 High Gain Amp
• UAFX Knuckles ’92 Rev F Dual Rec Amplifier

So of this selection of 34 I own 27 :

Finalists

• Audiostorm Grand

So this incredibly busy month was supposed to be all about Tremolos, culminating with the Rounder Sounds Zebra-Trem Review and 30 Tremolo Pedal Overview. But we hit some snags along the way - the Zebra-Trem was mysteriously held up in customs for a week, and then got slightly lost in the local postal network. And when it did finally arrive - evidently it had been dropped a few times, as the screen was no longer working. After trying various obvious remedies with Bill over a few days - with no ...

The Wave Cannon has long been on my wishlist, alongside Caroline’s Shigeharu Octave Fuzz. It seems the time is right for the Wave Cannon - now in its best ever iteration, and kind of returning more to its original 2010 roots versus the more divergent MKII edition.

Philippe Herndon launched the Caroline Guitar Company back in 2010, and the Wave Cannon was its very first product - a heavily modified and evolved ProCo Rat with more shaping and gain-range.

The nearest I had come to owning ...

People often ask me why I don’t feature more Caroline Guitar Co pedals on this site (besides when I do my medium enclosure features) - where I’m actually often conflicted when it comes to Caroline Guitar Co’s pedals - on one hand they look great and usually sound pretty fantastic, while part of me always feels that they are a little over-sized - where every pedal is made in 1590-BB enclosure. Phillip McKnight would for sure call these 90’s style pedals - much like he did with the recent PRS ...

August has been another impressively busy month with lots of excellent new pedal releases which has certainly kept me on my toes. I always thought August used to be a fairly quiet month in the annual release calendar. While I guess this year there have been so many delays - because of parts supply issues and the like - that lots of launches have been unusually pushed back - which means those pedals just weren’t ready until about now.

I am particularly impressed to have got my hands on the ...

Readers should know by now that I’m a huge fan of the overlapping genre of Fuzzy-Drive and Fuzzstortion style gain pedals - which tend to cover a variety of Fuzz, Overdrive and Distortion pedals - which all have a certain fuzzy character to them where they blur at least a couple of boundaries.

For me the sort of archetype of that sound is the Bixonic Expandora - while there are a great number of pedals that fall into that same sort of catchment area - and the 28 listed here are just a small...

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 ...

New for NAMM is Caroline’s Megabyte upgrade from the well-loved Kilobyte Lo-Fi Delay. The Special Advanced Limited Run was announced pre-NAMM on the 14th - and sold out pretty much instantly as usual.

I really should have more Caroline Guitar Co pedals in my collection, but as I have such a heavy preference for compact enclosure pedals - and generally more extended-range effects - means Caroline does not always get a look-in. I do have a couple of Caroline dirt pedals on my ...