I love the blooming harmonics of the Super-Fuzz circuit, yet a lot of those originals are a little underpowered on the output. I prefer vintage-inspired but slightly modernised circuits which have a significantly improved output profile.

This will be my own 25th Super-Fuzz - that’s how much I like the format. And Vitalii has really pulled out all the stops for his version. The original 1968 Super-Fuzz essentially had 3 controls :

Balance (Volume), Expander (Fuzz Amount), Tone Switch : ...

The Gunshot is Thorpy’s oldest official pedal - around 10 years old now, the Warthog is nearly as old - give or take a year or so, and the Peacekeeper is slightly more recent. I did an article a while back on Thorpy’s original award-winning trifecta - which includes the Gunshot, Warthog and Fallout Cloud Fuzz.

For the 3 pedals featured - Thorpy has revisited the pedal artwork for each - where his fairly recently arrived Roland UV-Printer can deliver a lot more intricate and full-colour ...

So February, as expected, turned out to be quite the slow moving month - with not too many featured releases. You always get the big announcements at NAMM - and then it takes a few months typically for those pedals to filter through.

There were a few heavy hitters that emerged in February or sooner - including the Kernom Elipse Modulation Playground, and the Polyend Step Drum Machine Pedal - both of which went on the board this month.

I also made the Plutoneium Chi-Wah-Wah a permanent ...

Many know of my obsession with the Blakemore Devices Deus Ex Machina - which still remains elusive to my grasp. I came very close to snagging one last year - but I was seemingly just a split second too late in hitting the buy button - and I missed out once more. Those pedals only spring up once every couple of years (not many were made!).  I reached out to Blake Hickey - who was originally keen to make just one more for me - but he them got cold feet and is now seemingly ghosting me - so I need...

Readers should know by now that I’m a huge fan of Rat style Distortion circuits - where I have over 40 of that kind in my reference collection. There have been several recent additions - including the Caroline Wave Cannon Zero and Drunk Beaver LA Metal - both of which are superb!

The RoyalBreaker hits somewhat differently to most - with a fiery and explosive delivery - sizzling with searing sustaining disortion. Most Rat pedals have some flavour of Marshall Crunch within their core texture ...

So January 2025 sees a momentous milestone - where we have the peak possible number of pedals in the chain - which now numbers no less than 52 Pedals. It’s an incredibly tight squeeze - and all the available space is now fully used up.

I’ve re-flowed the main visual - where I used to try to have a fixed format arrangement - but now have re-numbered the slots entirely corresponding to the number and order of those pedals. Last January I noted that I was going to switch out my 2 Friedman ...

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 ...

33 slots updated this year - #2, #3, #4, #5, #7, #9a, #9b, #10, #11, #12, #15a, #15b, #15c, #16, #17, #18, #19, #20, #22a, #22b, #23, #24, #25, #26, #29, #30, #31, #32, #33, #34, #36, #38, and #41.

There’s been a fair amount of re-routing and re-organising this year - which you should be able to pick via the pattern of changes. The introduction of the stereo Poly Amplitude introduced the biggest change to the board order - to get th most out of that format!

I try to limit acquisitions /...

So this is the big one - all the top performers from the year in one selection.

We’ve already covered :

• 35 Boost & Overdrive Pedal Finalists
• 34 Distortion Pedal Finalists
• 32 Fuzz Pedal Finalists
• 38 Modutility Pedal Finalists
• 25 Delay and Reverb Pedal Finalists

Total Overall Finalist Selection of 164 Pedals!

Distilled down to the final favourites selection, where I own 27 of them, and will try to secure the final missing ones next year :

• Coffee Shop Pedals London Fog Tape Delay -