This is obviously a follow-up from the Josh Scott / JHS January 1st YouTube video as below. Where Josh carried out and exercise where he compiled the best pedals released over the last two decades - in 6 specific categories - Best Overdrive / Distortion, Best Fuzz, Best Time-Based Effect, Best Modulation, Best Compressor, and Best Weird / Other - all must have been release January 1st 2000 or later.

Along with his own take, he solicited opinions from Jamie Stillman of EQD, Matthew ...

This is one of those articles that’s been a long-time coming, and where I needed to spend a rather large chunk of time getting fully under the skin of the pedal in question - the really quite superb, but also somewhat slightly flawed Boss GT-1000 CORE Guitar Effects Processor.

I must start by stating that I came into this project with somewhat lofty expectations, and there was some degree of naivety to my beliefs as to what was contained within this pedal, and more importantly ...

And so here is the culmination of everything that happened to the pedal-chain in 2020.

There were quite a few more displacements than I had expected - all told 22 slots changed over this year - including 19 Brand New Pedals for 2020, then 3 slightly older pedals, and some incidentals.

The most significant shift, and the one that caused the most disruption was the arrival of Boss GT-1000 CORE in October. This is often the case when you bring in a big new pedal - and you need to...

The third in my 2020 roundup series covers interesting and innovative Delay and Reverb Pedals released during the year, while it excludes the bigger Reverb Workstation Pedals - which I already featured back on November 30th. In that article I declared 2020 to be the ’Year of Reverb’ - as there have been so many quality releases in that genre.

Here we deal mostly with compact and medium variants with slightly fewer modes and parameters, but not necessarily entirely. The one ...

Some of you will have seen Flamma Pedals featured quite highly on several gear forums of late, and several of you readers have been asking for my take on the subject. To my mind Mooer’s diminutive 7 Series was the first to do this kind of thing in incorporating 7 Presets, 5 Controls and a Select/Save button on the mini format.

I note that for the FSO2 Reverb - it has the exact same modes in the same order as the Mooer 7 Series equivalent - so I can only imagine that Mooer is ...

October has proven to be another fairly significant month - both in terms of new pedal releases / arrivals and my own pedal-chain evolution. I’m also in the midst of a Vick Audio phase - having relatively recently acquired most of the key pedals in that range - including all 5 Tau Series Muff variants - which were all in my chain together for a big chunk of October.

There were a number of very significant releases/arrivals this month for me - including the Boss GT-1000 CORE and ...

This time we’re looking at the Arcades’ REVERSE Card - which covers a series of intricate Reverse Delays - with additional controls variously for Pitch, Speed, Direction, Octaves, Modulation and other signal manipulations. As before, the majority of these are very straightforward and straight-laced even in that sense even though somewhat unique in makeup, while others can be a little more quirky.

When I think of Reverse Delays, my immediate reference point is Danelectro&...

I’ll jump straight to the obvious here in calling this Boss’s contender to go against current category leader and long-term reigning champ - the Line 6 Helix HX STOMP Multi Effects Processor and Amp Modeller - which interestingly retails for $599 in the USA, but only around £399 on this side of the pond. While starting RRP tag for the GT-1000 CORE will be £615 (vs GT-1000 currently retailing at £799UK/$999USA). In fact prices are weirdly quite disparate between UK,...

This time around we’ll be looking at probably the most straightforward and vanilla (but not exactly) of the 8 Arcades Cards to date - while each mode / algorithm has a pretty distinct take on each delay sub-type. Generally the delay sounds here are rich and elegant and beautifully musical - with very distinct timbres achievable by clever application of Modulation and Clock Rate / Resolution in particular.

Most of the modes here will be familiar to the average guitarist - with ...

August was quite a slow month in many ways - particularly for those of us clinging to the last vestiges of hope towards the arrival of a Buffalo FX Reticon Flanger. That now seems a very distant pipe-dream indeed as reports indicate that Steve Painter is suffering from some horribly debilitating condition that prevents him from doing any physical activities for the foreseeable future. He’s not officially responded to any communiqués since June 30th - the last day many of us heard ...