So despite this being a relatively quiet month for releases - I was somehow manically busy throughout!
The month started with custom editions of ThorpyFX and Empress pedals, and I then did 2 massive articles for the Glou-Glou Flancher Series of Stereo Analog Delays / Modulators, and in-depth coverage of Henrik Nordvang’s excellent 1590B3 Series. I’m not sure people realise just how much works goes into those kinds of articles!
Also this month - Mini Pedals were a major feature - all ...
Another article nudged into being by Anderton’s Doom Fuzz feature. I’m obviously still a little fixated on the Mini pedal format currently - and so need to follow that trail unto that curiosity is finally satisfied.
When I did the recent follow-up feature on the Tone City Matcha Cream, I got to thinking about the Mooer Triangle Buff also - which I had long intended to acquire, but never got around to. I hadn’t realised that said Triangle Buff had already been discontinued for a while and ...
So in my usual twisted fashion I’ve somewhat fallen down a rabbit hole of Mini Pedals these days. This project was sparked off by the recent Andertons Ultimate Doom Pedal Shoot-out. That has some very oddly selected pedals within its shoot-out considerations, but where the Tone City Matcha Cream Green Russian did extremely well - in fact winning the most rounds - 8 in total of all the pedals trialled.
The eventual winner was kind of immaterial to me, I was all of a sudden intrigued as to ...
Like many of you I suspect, I watched the Andertons Ultimate Doom Pedal episode with a mix of glee and bemusement (video below) - where some of that selection was a touch odd. While there were some obvious winners too - including the DOD Carcosa, EHX Ram’s Head Muff and of course the Tone City Matcha Cream. The final winner was declared as the Behringer SF300 (based on the Boss FZ-2) - while as readers know, I cannot see myself ever supporting that brand - for somewhat obvious reasons.
I ...
The third in my 2020 roundup series covers interesting and innovative Delay and Reverb Pedals released during the year, while it excludes the bigger Reverb Workstation Pedals - which I already featured back on November 30th. In that article I declared 2020 to be the ’Year of Reverb’ - as there have been so many quality releases in that genre.
Here we deal mostly with compact and medium variants with slightly fewer modes and parameters, but not necessarily entirely. The one pedal that puts ...
This is the 4th of my recent ’12 Degrees’ Series - this time moving beyond the boundaries of gain / saturation into the area of modulation. There are of course many more than the 12 modulations I have selected here - there are aliasing, ring modulation and lo-fi signal degeneration effects as well as more complex multi-combo effects, splicers and complex pattern modulators - including for instance the excellent recent Big Ear Albie. Of course the more obscure the category of ...
I’m occasionally chastised by readers for not featuring enough lower cost pedals on this site - which is a somewhat unfair criticism really as I try to be as value-minded as possible - and do genuinely love pedals at all levels - and am ever on the look out for a bargain or two for myself.
Most will already know Tone City as an even more affordable Mooer-style mostly mini pedal operation, while most are not aware that lead engineer / circuit-designer J. Wong used to be at Movall ...
My first introduction to the Klon Centaur came via That Pedal Show, and even then I was not really that aware of all the fuss and hype over the Bill Finnegan originals - now selling for in excess of £2,000 on Reverb.com which is plainly ridiculous, especially considering that a fairly significant volume was made of those big-box gold and silver pedals.
Yet there is something to that Klon sound, and many people have made it their life’s mission to evolve and improve on that ...
Or - everything I did not know about Pedals when I got back into guitar.
You may recall from my ’Tone Anxiety’ blog post that I listed a few hundred pedal manufacturers and mentioned that they were just a drop in the ocean - well, it turns out to be a darn sight more complicated than that. Not only do you have hundreds of these pedal makers, often just one guy in their workshop - in pretty much every country in the world, you also have a huge second-hand market of current ...