News

It’s a little early to call it - in fact a full day ahead of the opening of this year’s Winter NAMM, but it looks like Joel Korte has stolen the show here! In recent weeks I have been getting to grips with the superb BYOC Crown Jewel - and I stated several times in that review - how much impact presets could have for such a pedal.

And while the Automatone PreAmp MKII does not have quite as many tone-sculpting and clipping options as the Crown Jewel, it shares a great many ...

So I discovered these two instruments somewhat by chance - the Les Paul style one fairly recently, while the SG I’ve now come across a few times. The Daniels LP style guitar is actually a couple of years old while the Gibson is the ridiculously limited Billy Gibbons Ultimate SG from the Neiman Marcus Christmas Catalogue back in 2015 - and which retailed for a hefty $30,000 back then. The LP-style is a one-off custom build by UK luthier Darren Daniels whose prices are supposedly relatively...

When I did my various country-based pedal-builder overviews I came across a large number of pedals which looked either too samey or else were somewhat unimpactful aesthetically and/or thematically. A significant part of my day job consists of Brand Stategy / Brand Engineering and Design Consultancy and part of me always wants to improve things and make them better - whether that is wanted or not - so you can heed this advice or ignore as you feel pertinent.

For pedal-makers, the ...

Strange as it may seem, but I’ve actually been waiting for such a pedal for quite some time. In my piece on the ’12 of the Best Tape Delay Pedals for Your Consideration’ I stated several times that I rather wanted a Multi-Head Binson Echorec 2 style delay, but it really needed to be stereo to fit into my own rig. Ideally there could be a pedal which combined the best of all those so-called tape-delay-effects - The Echrorec, Echoplex and Space Echo all in one box. Foxpedal does...

I’ve featured BYOC’s Crown Jewel Multidrive on this site several times previously but only superficially really. It is the kind of Swiss Army Knife of drive pedals that will put some off by virtue of its sheer range and versatility (so many dials and switches) - so I’ve tried to break things down here in a more manageable fashion, while providing everything you need to get the most out of this pedal. I am generally a huge fan of Keith Vonderhulls - Mr BYOC himself - and if and...

You may have noted that JHS has gotten quite a lot of coverage on this site - being mentioned on no less than 47 different posts, and featuring pedals in just about every category. Yet to date I have only 2 of these in my collection - the two ’greatest hits’ editions as I call them, or the Bonsai Multi-Tube-Screamer and Muffuletta Multi-Big-Muff.

In fact I have more JHS-modded pedals than JHS original - these include the recent 4 EHX Big Muff Compacts, the Satisfaction Fuzz...

I have to confess that I used to be a touch confused between Chorus/Vibrato and Vibe/Uni-Vibe effects. In certain pedals there is a degree of overlap, but generally a genuine Uni-Vibe pedal is actually a sort of phaser / phase-shifter whose effect is generated by bulb-driven photocell modulation. The original Shin-Ei Uni-Vibe was developed in around 1967/8 to replicate the Leslie / Rotary Speaker sound. While it did not come nearly close enough to achieving that effect, it did nonetheless ...

Carrying on from last year - where I somewhat correctly predicted pedals would continue to get more compact, larger numbers would adapt dual-footswitch functionality and pedalboards and pedal-chains would get increasingly larger - I have now identified 4 more prevailing trends for this year.

I have selected 4 pedals which underscore these trends - three of my favourites from last year, and the forthcoming significantly enhanced and improved Red Panda Particle V2. These pedals ...

There are in essence 3 types of dual footswitch drive pedals - Drive + Boost, Dual Channel Individual/Independent, and Dual Channel Stackable. I’m really enjoying combining the two channels of my King of Tone pedal, which is what inspired this article. The 4 pedals featured here both allow you to stack the two ’channels’ together, as well as typically have extended control over the distortion side in particular. The Empress Multidrive differs from the others here by stacking ...

Marshall takes up a lot of bandwidth on the pedal overdrive and distortion spectrum, and I have a lot of articles dedicated to said genres including several recent ones. So this one covers those pedals which are of a somewhat rarer and different kind. I have chosen not to do specific PreAmp-style pedals or dedicated Amp and Channel pedals by the amp-makers themselves, but rather to feature more generic pedals which distinctly give you the flavour of the amp/s they intend to simulate.

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