This post has much to do with one Scotty Smith - the engineer behind the original Manticore. He’s always been a great engineer, but somewhat suspect on the business front - with a number of of bankrupt / failed and indebted businesses to his name. He last ended up at Pogo Pedals - most famous for their Zen Ray Overdrive, while that business has fallen by the wayside too. His current whereabouts are unclear.

He first released the 4-knob V1 Manticore back in 2017 - with the 5th knob V2 ...

All 4 of these are One-Knob 4-cable / 4-port Noise Gates - where you can place all your ’noisy’ pedals in an FX Loop, and allow your other effects to pass through unaffected. I feel Boss pioneered this approach first with its 3-knob NS-2 from 1987 while there may have been someone before then which I don’t have any references for!- while I still rely on my Alchemy Audio Modded NS-2 Noise Suppressor - which has been firmly lodged in my rig / signal chain almost from the start - probably my ...

So we have 3 direct Colorsound One Knob Fuzz Box derivatives, and one sort of somewhat adjacent one in the guise of the Weird Noise Fuzz It. These are all essentially mostly 2-stage kind of high gain Silicon Fuzz Faces of a sort  - but very much in the low-end accentuated Doom category (more of the low-end frequencies get passed through eh circuits rather than being fitlered out).

The original One Knob Colorsound Fuzz had 1 x BC109 and 1 x BC108 Silicon High Gain Transistors - ’C’ types, ...

I can’t say exactly why - but compact Wah pedals have been on my mind recently. I’ve long favoured the Mini CryBaby editions - where I have most of that variety - the original CBM95 Mini Wah, then the CBM535Q, and the CBM535AR Auto-Return featured here, in fact the only one I’m missing from that set is the Jimi Hendrix Mini - the JHM9 - which I will undoubtedly snag somewhat opportunistically at some stage.

So from this listing I currently only have 1 - obviously the CryBaby one, where all ...

So for some reason I keep running across the new Danelectro Spring King Junior demo by RJ Ronquillo, where details are still fairly scant and I’ve only seen it for sale on the Loopers Paradise Webstore to date.

Apart from stating 9V DC [-] 50mA Current Draw - there are no further specs available, so I’ve kind of guesstimated the pedal length being near enough the same as the width of the White Whale V2 or around 170mm. The longest / widest is the Surfy Bear Compact at 250mm, while the ...

So I’ve obviously covered each of these pedals individually and in real depth - so please refer to the earlier articles if you need more details. The purpose of this exercise is to pick out my favourite/s from the series - which is really about comparing those 4 pedals head-to head across my 2 favourite settings for each - pitting one against the other - back and forth - until we have a preferences.

Note - that if you want to skip all the preamble - you can just scroll down to the bottom ...

I would like to start my apologising that I got the previous One Knob Phaser article wrong - as I momentarily lapsed into thinking that the EHX Small Stone was a 2-Stage variant, where it’s rather the very first of the 4-Stage varieties. I’m so used to associating 4-Stages with the MXR Phase 90 - that it has always been my key benchmark, and until recently I’ve not been entirely clear on EHX’s illustrious phaser history - which I am now!

I still find it somewhat infuriating that you’re not ...

NOTE! - I made a mistake here - the EHX Small Stone is a 4-stage type - will need to re-do this article. Looks like I now have enough for a One-Knob 4-stage rundown - but so far can only find 3 One-Knob 2-Stage types - do let me know if you discover a worthy 4th!

I was originally going to focus on the Phase 90 4-Stage types, but could not find enough for a significant full house - while there seemed to be a lot more of the 2-Stage variety - which is what this selection consists of.

All ...

We’re back onto the fully similar pedals again - with 4 contemporary examples of a vintage 2-knob chorus. All of these sport the exact same chip set - consisting of the 3207 + 3102 Boss CE-3 style chipset - but using the CoolAudio V3207 and V3102 variants - versus the original Matsushita / Panasonic MN3207 and MN3102 variants. In fact there’s just one tiny difference here in that the Way Huge Blue Hippo has a different Chinese BL3102 variant of that chip type - but with identical values. Which ...