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By all accounts a rather fabulous and timely pedal, in a great form factor, yet a couple of things have me a touch peeved from the outset. One fairly minor, while the other is likely a lot more significant. On the minor side - I always get somewhat annoyed when builders are overly opaque about the mechanics of their pedals. Seymour Duncan does not mention what manner of technology generates the tone, while one would guesstimate OpAmp as the likeliest source - I am one of those who likes to know...

So I thought I would combine the Mini Pedal selection with the final overall category roundup featuring my current favourites and forthcoming/future acquisition targets. The above visual may be somewhat convoluted, but it well illustrates the trade off in footprint and practicality/utility you get across the different enclosure form factors.

I’ve stated before that I’ve largely moved away from the larger styles of enclosures in favour of more pedals of a more compact nature...

This is an update to the feature I wrote back in March of this year. I now have more of this selection in my collection - 18 of these 24, and there are 3 pedals that are new to this updated roundup - the Airis Effects Nemesis PreAmp, Blackhawk Amplifiers Balrog Distortion V3, and of course the Redbeard Effects Red Mist MKIV.

The 6 here that I’ve yet to acquire for my collection but which are of course all on the wishlist are the aforementioned Airis Effects Nemesis PreAmp and ...

This is probably the penultimate article in this series for the year - actually I might do another with my own personal favourites from all of these selections. Next up will of course be compact enclosure variants, but here we are at the other end of the scale with the Big Boxes of Metal! A reader asked me why I had not included the Friedman BE-OD Deluxe in the previous category - Horizontal Medium Enclosure - and the fact is that it’s just a touch too large. I have my own system of pedal...

This article follows on from the recent Vertical aspect medium enclosure roundup where I indicated a number of potential acquisition targets. Here we have the same enclosure size but width-ways in orientation - with a key differentiator being the number of pedals here with dual footswitches - where all but two either have a second Channel or additional Boost option.

There are two permanent fixtures of my pedal-chain here - the Empress Heavy and MI Effects Megalith Delta which have ...

This post was triggered by the recently announced Crazy Tube Circuits 4-Mode Cyclone Phaser - which comes in my own preferred phaser format - compact enclosure, analogue circuit, and with a second tap-tempo footswitch. In my last Phaser overview there were two examples of this - the Chase Bliss Wombtone, and the V1 of the then Red House Midnight Phaser - now the Native Audio V2 Midnight Phaser! New to me are the recently launched Vein-Tap Dark Arts Phaser, and the brand new Crazy Tube Circuits ...

Subdecay’s latest pedal underlines the wealth of new synth pedals we have had this year - including examples from Boss, EHX, Empress Effects, Keeley Electronics, Parasit Studio, Pigtronix, Red Witch and Source Audio to name a few - as well as a slew of new releases last year. As much as this is the era of glitch effects and granular synthesis and micro loopers, it also has to be said that there are a very significant amount of new guitar synth pedals out there too.

I have had ...

One of the areas I have yet to get properly stuck into is making recordings from my Stereo Rig - up until now I had been planning on some sort of 3 Mic setup with one per Cab, and an ambient Room Mic. This approach would have involved all manner of additional hardware boxes and cabling, signal-fine-tuning, re-balancing and mix down, and while there are a couple or so decent Stereo Amp/Cab Simulators already on the market - nothing has held any appeal for me until now.

Strymon in their ...

This has long been a rumour, and there have been various ’hacked’ versions of the CBA Dark World Reverb to expand and focus on the Generation Loss ’MOD’ algorithm included on that. Seems that Tom Majeski and Joel Korte finally decided to put this rumour to bed with a limited 1000 unit edition Chase Bliss Audio take on the full-fat Cooper FX Generation Loss.

Along with the more compact dual-footswitch enclosure format, this newer format offers a few more aces up ...

This article was sparked by the recent launch of the Andy James Signature Revenant Distortion Pedal - made by STL Tones - which are an outfit best known for their digital apps and plugins - this is their first hardware effect and is excellent regardless of a first attempt. It uses all-analogue components to recreate the Andy James tone that STL previously generated via software and DSP means.

Most of the other pedals here have been listed and featured before on this side - and besides ...