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Australia and New Zealand together have a fair few brands of international repute, and I for one certainly have a number of pedals of Australian origin in my collection. Foremost amongst those is Michael Ibrahim’s eponymous MI Audio / MI Effects - from which range past and present - I have 7 to date - with a couple more on the ’nice-to-have’ wishlist. Of the ones I have 2 are permanent features in my pedal-chain - the Super Crunch Box V2 (my Brown Sound pedal of choice) and ...

In line with its ongoing enclosure format innovations and taking significant influence from the recent 500 series - Boss replaces the dual latching-plate format of its 20 Series Twin Pedal line with a much more compact and sleeker medium vertical enclosure 200 Series Design - with 4 pedals due to launch in September, and all priced at £219 as of the moment:

• DD-200 12 Mode Digital Delay Stereo Workstation - £219
• EQ-200 10 Band Dual Channel Stereo Graphic Equalizer - £219

This is one of those moments that I feel that my celebrated Pedal-Chain has reached another milestone of ’peak performance’. There are a number of new releases here - and probably all the big ones I was expecting this year - bar the Chase Bliss Audio / Benson Amps Automatone MKII PreAmp - which is due in the Autumn now - and still pending final pricing, but will probably take up the top spot on Slot #14 eventually. Also - my long-awaited Beetronics Swarm Harmonizing PLL Style Fuzz ...

So it’s that usual post NAMM-haze time where I figure out the longer-term impact of NAMM, and how those new products will affect the layout, order and composition of my now sort of 40-slot pedal-chain. As noted several times - this was indeed a bumper year for really innovative and highly appealing new pedals - and I will look to accommodate a number of those as they materialise in the forthcoming months.

As I hinted in my last pedal-chain overview - while 2018 was very evidently...

2018 has been a really surprising year for pedals - there have been quite a few unexpected innovations along the way with also some of the usual production delays and holdups. As I write this I am still waiting for my long-overdue Jackson Audio Bloom to arrive - but I expect it will be worth the delay. I would have liked to have seen the Empress Zoia despatched this year too, as sort of predicted though - I feel that it will be pushed into next year - to coincide with Winter NAMM possibly - in ...

UPDATE 1 - It’s often the case that just after you publish, something big happens which forces a change of stance. On this occasion it was the release of the truly amazing Wampler Pantheon Overdrive which has immediately found its way into Slot #10 of the chain. In fact I have sort of swapped slots #10 and #12 around - relegating the Spaceman Aphelion to a supporting role for now.

UPDATE 2 - Still no word from Jackson Audio on the delayed Bloom Compressor etc. - which means the ...

This follows on from my earlier article on British Pedal Builders - I had no immediate plans to do a series of these, but there are definitely certain nations that excel in pedal-making which I quite enjoy featuring. I need not really include the most prodigious - the USA as most pedals still come from there, but will focus on some of the smaller nations and do fairly compact roundups of each. As I said I had no plans originally beyond British, but will likely do French, German, Italian, ...

As stated elsewhere, I got back into guitar again in September 2016, and initially had decided to keep it simple with a great guitar and a cool modern modelling amp. Yet I soon found out that this was not delivering the goods for me and decided in November 2016 that I should pursue the pedal / stompbox route also known as ’pedal platform route’.

A very great number of YouTube videos I watched in those early days, as well as pedalboard pictures on Pinterest featured Strymon ...

As I will endeavour to describe in a separate blog post, several pedal-makers have duo offerings of multi-function delay and reverb pedals - most notably Boss and TC Electronic. And now Electro-Harmonix has joined the fray as it were. A little over one year after the release of the Canyon we now get the same sort of format for a Reverb pedal. The central alt function button is now a Mode selector rather than a Tap Divide selector - but the layout and topology of the two pedals is identical with...

Most of these were included in my Comparative Compact Pedal Acquisition overview - I’ve just added the OBNE Mondegreen and brand new EHX Oceans 11 into the mix. I had expected there to be more pairs here - and while for instance we have the excellent Mad Professor Kosmos, MXR M300, Neunaber Immerse and Shift Line A+ Astronaut Reverbs, those companies don’t have an equivalent Multi-Function Delay. The same can be said of the Chase Bliss Thermae and Tonal Recall, Montreal Assembly ...