I am somewhat exasperated to still be seeing several ill-informed nonsense critiques of these more fully featured pedals - where certain factions are denouncing them as sort of jacks-of-all-trade with insufficient core tonal qualities that mean they cannot hack it with just the basic 3 - Volume, Gain and Tone knobs!

I refer below to one of the classic Two Rock Amps - specifically the Silver Sterling Signature - which has 17 exceptionally useful controls - including those 6 mode toggle-...

Most should know by now that I’m a huge Rat aficionado - and for me Rat doesn’t just mean those original ProCo Rat varieties but all the different derivatives - direct and indirect - old and new, classics, rarities and outliers. This category is titled ’Rat-Style’ so there’s a few Rat-adjacent pedals here too which share some of the core fundamentals and bring to mind some key associations with that well-known highly textured frequency profile.

For me at a...

June hasn’t been a particularly kind month to me - in fact it’s been something of a difficult period - I was going to call this piece ’The Darkness Lingers’ but didn’t really want that particular NLP on this blog - which I try to keep as positive as is practically possible.

A number of ventures and collaborations I was working on this month came a cropper when the other collaborating parties somewhat inexplicably and suddenly ended their involvement - ...

I have often cited the Ditto Mini Looper as TC Electronic’s key product - and most likely top sales champion over these years - as pretty much everyone I know has one. It has had to withstand an onslaught of almost identical copycat products at a fraction of its price - so it’s understandable that TCE felt they needed to do something to reestablish their leadership credentials in this area.

I’m obviously far from the first to cover this as I have a publishing ...

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 ...

I’ve been a fan of Steve Demedash for a few years now, though I’ve not gotten around to acquiring any of his pedals quite yet - the timing seemingly continues to fall out of sync with my concurrent reality! Had I the funds right now I would certainly be considering getting involved in this Friday the 26th’s Melée - where 50 of the clear aluminium enclosure version with colourful stripes and matching aluminium knobs will be going on sale at 10am CST for the princely sum ...

Following on from features on enclosure design and artworks, interior circuit arrangements and packaging - I felt it necessary to focus on the much neglected art of the Pedal Manual and Instruction Guide. Over the years I’ve seen a huge variety of instruction guides included with my hundreds of pedals - from flimsy black-and white photostats - just overly-folded sheets of low-quality paper really with barely legible text - through to more well-considered and actually smartly engineered ...

I received the full set of Decibelics gut shots a little late for inclusion in my recent piece on ’Interior Pedal and Circuit Design / Art’. So I then had the option of appending these as an addendum to that article, or evolving them into more of a solo feature. And as there are some other significant specifics I wish to convey in relation to this particular trio of pedals - I decided upon the latter.

More fortuitously still - Guillem has within the week released an ...

I’ve been a fan of Ryan and Tanya Clarke for the longest time, and currently have 4 of their best in my collection, with a couple more on the wishlist. My first and to-date all-time favourite Dr Scientist pedal is the exceptional Frazz Dazzler 2-Channel Fuzz - which while wholly unique, most equate with a Muff style of fuzz, yet for me it’s more of an extended range / high-gain Rat.

So the Frazz Dazzler was my first, then came the BitQuest and next my Gold Bar Edition The ...

I must confess that when I first came across the Kuro P.h.A. I kind of rather dismissed it as yet another of those myriad just a tiny bit different overdrives. I think I was to a large degree misled by a number of the earlier fairly uninspiring and unrepresentative demos. I can’t overstate the importance of a good demo towards portraying a just and accurate account of a pedal’s range and capabilities. Mediocre and underwhelming demos can ever undermine and taint the reputations of ...