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Contrary to my original analysis - all 3 pedals are actually pretty well rounded and ready to go - while Jackson Audio want to give each a chance to reach their intended audience - meaning a staggered release - with the first to be made available being Joey Landreth’s signature Golden Boy Overdrive ($299) - pre-orders will be up any day soon with shipping due to start in February. The pedal gets its name from a statue which sits atop the Manitoba Legislative Building in Joey’s home ...

Christian Lessenich or Chris Jupiter as many know him is one of the great sonic adventurers out there - forever seeking to break new boundaries and go further than man has gone before. His challenge on this occasion was to produce an explosively nasty / gnarly fuzz - which he has achieved in part through a clever evolution of the Super Fuzz circuit and using some really high gain Russian NOS transistors.

You have 4 controls on the pedal - wide-ranging Volume, Gain and Tone knobs, ...

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 ...

I have long been a fan of Alexander’s slightly quirky NEO Series of pedals - with 4 onboard presets, up to 6 modes and secondary / alt functions on every knob - all in handy dual-footswitch compact enclosures. To-date I have only acquired overdrives and the La Calavera Phaser - but there are many more Alexander Pedals on my wishlist and likely at least a couple more candidates here.

The big release is the Superball Kinetic Modulator - a sort of modulated delay - which for one of ...

Catalinbread’s new pedals for NAMM are a highly versatile / tweakable fuzz and sort of mini version of the Belle Epoch Pre. The Giygas Fuzz benefits from Tilt EQ, Mids, Dry Blend, Loud (Volume) and Fuzz Settings - where the EQ and Mids dials are both centre-detented on 900Hz for suitable strident and cutting / aggressive fuzz. The Blend control helps temper the Fuzz and bring in some of the Dry signal for ambience or damping impact - all in all a great-sounding extended-range fuzz. The ...

I have conceptually always loved DBA pedal, yet its finest flagships are always a little too large for my preferences. The Evil Filter for example has long hovered on my wishlist, but I am still stalled by its oversized footprint - which is the same for this fantastic Reverb.

The Rooms Stereo Reverberator somewhat justifies its size by having all the proper ports / jacks present, and 6 different algorithms / modes to get vibing with:

• Room
• Digital
• Peak
• Gate
• Wave
• Gong

You have...

Mythos’s two new pedals are pretty distinctive and are very much rooted in close collaboration with the artists they were made for. The first pictured (upper) is RJ’s ’Susmaryosep!’ Which is essentially an Herculean V2 Overdrive (808) variety in the centre flanked by single-slider controlled Echo and Boost - each of which has its own footswitch - so you can use simple Boost, Drive and Slap Echo in any combination - the pedal colourway also sort of matches RJ’s new ...

I caught some early preview snaps of these on Instagram - and have been waiting for a while for better resources to appear yet to no avail. In the end I had to make my own composites from the best reference I could find online as it does not appear Jackson Audio will be releasing proper details during the show. I was able to do decent facsimiles of the Modular Fuzz and Golden Boy - and will do the El Guapo Distortion image/overview separately / additionally later - as and when better references...

We have to offer up thanks to the gear gods for a genius with quite such limitless fertile imagination. I can imagine Gamechanger Audio’s take on this would be quite different and more complex, but David is definitely not afraid of the stranger side of things - with none of his effects pedals being even remotely vanilla. And even though there are some practicality issues with the Minibar in its current format - it is nonetheless ingenious and effective in what it does.

David&...

When I first caught sight of the new pedal without reading the notes I looked rather disappointingly at the singular input and output, and the apparently just singular Preset onboard. This of course is the much improved and more compact version of the Context Reverb which brings it into line with the Tensor and Particle V2. Bizarrely though all of those are quite systematically different - with different control topologies and Preset executions. I really like my Particle V2 Granular / Pitch-...