The final arrangement for the year - all the pedals that impressed the most!

So we featured 120 pedals across the 5 Genre categories this year - as you’ve witnessed over the last 5 days, and those have been whittled and distilled down to these 27 Magnificent and Exceedingly Flavoursome candidates.

Picking out the very best of those is obviously a slightly subjective exercise while based on a series of exacting criteria - including innovation, versatility, practicality, variability, playability, quality of manufacture, quality of output and sheer enjoyment.

Here ...

And so to the final category - where competition is extremely fierce this year. No doubt some of your favourites will have missed the cut here - but hopefully this selection is fully representative of the best of the year. Obvious I lean more towards immersive stereo effects - mono doesn’t really do it for me so much - while there is a smattering of mono pedals in here too. Price, format, versatility and practicality - everything counts!

Of the 23 featured in the selection - I own around ...

This is one pedal you definitely need to dip into the manual to understand fully what’s going on - while the Hologram Electronics engineers have imbued this device with so much intuitive smarts that you should be up and running in no time.

This pedal is a shoe-in for the Eventide H90 on my #35 slot while they’re quite different beasts really - and the H90 gets you more granular in some ways - with many more algorithms precisely modelled - while you can only deploy two in combination. While ...

It’s funny that I feel I’ve already reviewed this pedal - courtesy of the recent Fjord Fuzz Loke - as both those pedals overlap considerably on function. The main difference here is that this MN3007 1024-stage BBD Device is fully analog, while the Loke is powered by a Spin FV-1 Chip.

There are for sure differences in control parameters, and in particular - the Meridian has a 3-way Waveform selector with Sine, Triangle and Flux options - the last mentioned being a somewhat unique semi-...

So May started with my posting the last of the NAMM Show stragglers, followed by an initial eclectic mix of different pedal types - while gradually leaning into ’Andy Timmons’ Month. I’ve always thought Andy to be a wonderful human being and a particularly fine journeyman guitarist. While it’s only in fairly recent years that he’s become somewhat more elevated in my affections as one of my all-time favourite guitar heroes. You will note that he did not feature in my last article on personal ...

This pedal is for all you fans of the Strymon Deco and similarly smart and versatile Tape Saturation Delay / Modulators. I’ve decided to call it a ’Dual Delay-Line Manipulator’ - as that pretty much describes the essence of this pedal in the fewest words - and denotes that it does a whole lot more than a short-form delay.

At its core it has a Spin FV-1 chip which generates a beautifully pristine echo by default - Daniel really gets the most out of this format - driving the chip to extreme ...

^ 2022 Final Arrangement - December

So the time has come again to to the final reckoning of the layout and composition of this year’s ultimate pedal chain arrangement. I’ve introduced a new ’⚓’ symbol into the visual - which indicates those Slots / Pedals that are unchanged from last year’s Class of 2021 arrangement. That element really is testament to how much has changed between years. It’s also indicative of how much I love those particular pedals - and pretty much find them ...

As I’ve just done all the category overviews / best of genre rundowns - you can refer to those for all the individual pedal details - most have full reviews on this site too - here I will simply lay down the longlist - and explain why I picked those top 3 here - so just the details for the 3 overall winners!

I normally try to single out around 40 each year in the final overview - but it also depends on how many can fit the ’jigsaw’ of the visual.

There were 4 pedals in the full longlist...