The 4th in my Cooper FX Arcades Card Spotlight series is another seemingly fairly straight-forward variety which actually is rather more surprising than that in several ways. These are not your typical Reverbs at all, go elsewhere for Room, Spring, Hall, Plate and the more vanilla varieties - the Arcades Reverbs are all about Atmospheric Textural Ambience.

While some Reverbs are designed to sit very much in the backdrop of your playing - these are rather more textured, distinct and ...

Readers will know me as a somewhat fuzz fanatic - with roughly half my collection dedicated to fuzz pedals, with over 30 varieties of Tone Bender, and more than 50 each of Fuzz Face and Big Muff varieties - mostly in the compact enclosure format - but medium, mini and large executions too.

I consider there to be 7 major varieties of Big Muff - as follows :

Triangle (1969) | Ram’s Head (1972/3) | Op Amp (1978) | Civil War (1993) | Green Russian (1994) | Black Russian (...

This has been a long time coming for some - with just the merest of glimpses at Winter NAMM - where I feel the few boxes we saw there were surely empty shells - as I never witnessed any actual play-through. Considering how much of a perfectionist Dave Friedman is it’s all understandable really as we know he would not release anything he’s not 100% happy with.

So it’s taken the best part of the year to tweak and tune this one to perfection. In terms of where it sits - ...

Boss’s Tube Logic Series of Nextone Amps somewhat failed to garner the same plaudits and support as the lower cost Katana Range - while the Artist edition Nextone contained some particularly clever circuitry - yet those amps did not resonate as well with their intended audiences as was predicted / expected. Meaning that the Boss engineers have expended some very significant effort in the interim towards getting the new Special Amp up to the level it truly deserves to be at.

The Nextone ...

Sitek Guitar Electronics makes 3 different Boost pedals - the Nursie Transparent Booster, Vixen Germanium Booster, and this updated V2 Caffeine Booster which kind of sits in between the Clean Boost of the Nursie, and the more Harmonic Gritty Boost of the Vixen.

The V1 edition of the Caffeine simply just had Level and Gain controls, while there are some new innovations on the V2 version. You can obviously see that 2 x toggle-switches have been added. The left-hand toggle-switch allows ...

Robert did say that the Eccos Delay / Looper was only the first of many pedals to inhabit his new stereo, multi-mode, preset-enabled compact effects platform format. And here we have another smart iteration of TremVerb - which somewhat overshadows the previous Verb o Trem variety.

All those great features we witnessed on the Eccos are back in full effect, but instead of multiple variations on a single effect type, here the pedal is split in half with 3 Tremolo options / Modes ...

You may recall the story of how I was for the longest time chasing the 3-Band EQ more compact original version of this pedal. But was persuaded by Ed in the end to go for the considerable superiority of his latest evolved edition - where he had finally gotten the noisefloor to its most optimal and desired level - and the timbre of the distortion to the perfect degree and combination of sizzle, punch and articulation.

The fact that you have 6 Active Bands of EQ - that you can adjust to ±...

So last week saw me snap up 2 rare and unusual Germanium Transistor Fuzz Pedals - I’ve covered the Chase Bliss Audio Bliss Factory in detail already, and here we have another highly innovative fuzz - which derives its name from the single Russian Germanium Transistor it employs.

We’ve seen overdrives before with separate OpAmps generating each of High, Middle and Low frequency content - which you then combine and mix together for unique harmonic output. I’m not aware ...

This edition comes rather hot on the heels of the recent 12 Degrees of Overdrive version as many readers’ inquiries questioned a couple of missing categories there - which I explained would rather figure within the Distortion contingent which is present here in all its glory!

As always, these is some considerable amount of grey science at play here - best typified by the Big Muff and Rat circuits - which are both very much distortions as well as fuzz varieties. I have 3 x 12 ...

Most of you who read this blog will know by now that Joel Korte worked for/with Zachary Vex from 2008 to 2013. While he was there he was responsible for the design and development of the Instant Lo-Fi Junky - which in many ways was the forerunner to the Warped Vinyl project.

In any case and while at Zvex, Joel picked up a taste for that brand’s flagship and all-time consistently best-selling Fuzz Factory pedal - which started out as a modified Germanium Fuzz Face which then gained a ...