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Readers of this blog will know that I’m a huge fan of Sheldon’s first official True North Pedal - the superior Tweed Drive. In common with the new Rocky Mountain Fuzz both have great core tonalities with a significant amount of versatility and range on tap via 3 tone-shaping controls - Volume, Tone and Fuzz (Gain/Saturation) in this instance. Both pedals also have the rather fabulous tweed fabric-wrapped enclosures - the newer version fetchingly dyed black. I feel that this should ...

I have covered off a number of my favourite Summer NAMM pedals already - including the Boss 200 range, RC-10R and SY-1, the Fulltone OCD Ge, the REVV G2, the Spaceman Effects Gemini IV, and Walrus Audio Kangra for instance. And there’s a couple more surprise ones I will be posting as dedicated features very soon - so stay alert for those! In the wake of one of the best ever Winter NAMM’s it was clear that the Summer NAMM could never match that degree of innovation - in fact most of ...

This is undoubtedly likely to be one of the standout innovations introduced at this Summer NAMM show. It is evident that Wild Customs Guitars has been working on this project for a while. They have come up with a modular rotating drum system of pickups - where Seymour Duncan single size pickups - any variety - regular, rails, mini-humbucker etc can be attached to a capsule and snapped in as one of 3 pickup options per modular ’barrel’ / cartridge.

In effect you have 3 ...

I’ve actually been meaning to do this post for a while now - I’ve had several requests over the years to do a ’best of’ feature for Catalinbread - with some even wanting one specifically on delays - which actually only number 6 and therefore don’t quite merit a solo outing - although we’ll see. So this at last is that post - taking in the best of new and established, innovative and unique - across the 4 sub-categories - Foundation Overdrives | Delays and ...

Let me start straight up by saying that these two pedals are not entirely the same thing - but they are in essence Fuzz pedals which use envelope filtering to modulate the fuzz sound in various ways. There is a degree of overlap here also in the kind of tones you can get out of each of these - so I thought it would be handy to do a rough head-to-head comparison and lay out some of my preferences.

The Kangra has obviously just been announced and there are no details yet on the Walrus ...

It has to be said that Carl Martin - a long-standing Danish pedal-builder of high pro-gear repute - was starting to look somewhat fusty and old-fashioned there for a while. And while some brands would look to simply refresh their graphics and update things in a largely superficial manner - Carl Martin set to designing an entirely new compact enclosure for its Vintage Series of pedals.

The incumbent pedals were in rather uninteresting medium enclosures while the degree of innovation and...

So even this close to Summer NAMM - Boss still somehow feels it needs to unveil its further innovations in advance of that key product launch event. And following on from the superb recent debut of the 200 series - we see another 200-style enclosure - albeit for some reason numerically not associate with said series. The RC-10R is the looper I’ve been waiting for. You may recall in my ’Early Summer Pedal-Chain’ overview I mentioned that I was not particularly enamoured with or...

I can’t recall exactly what the catalyst was to this article, but I’ve been considering versatile medium enclosure Big Muff style fuzzes a lot of late. I have 3 of the best of these already in constant rotation (Update 4 now actually!) - i.e. one momentarily replacing the other on the #19 slot of my pedal-chain - and alternating a whole lot with the PLL style fuzzes right at this moment.

In any case during the process of cycling the Demon Pedals Parvati, Toneczar Vault and ...

The Chase for a Gemini III has sort of been my White Whale really - as I’ve been on the case for several years now - but the going prices of the 2011 originals were just stratospherically ridiculous - in fact there are a couple on Ebay right now - ’Used!’ For $1,800 and $1,975 respectively! I feel those prices are going to come down somewhat significantly now though as the new version - albeit in a larger medium-vertical enclosure - has a notably superior feature set. Whenever...

Readers of this blog will already know how much a fan I am of BYOC’s Crown Jewel Multidrive pedal - with its multitude of dials and switches - 4 gain stages in effect and clean blend circuit. I’ve said that this is not only likely the most versatile drive pedal out there currently, but also an essential educational tool for understating how different degrees of voltage, clipping, tone-shaping and Q-control impact on the output signal.

I wasn’t really that much ...