So it’s about time for another round of ’12 Degrees of Saturation’ - featuring an updated selection and including most of the more recently released notable Mini Gain Pedals. Please note that as before - this is something of a Grey Science with simply approximated best fit positioning - as all those pedals have slightly different gain ranges, and certain ones within each selection / category can have vastly more extended range than others - and often cover more than one of the categories.

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Much like with the recent 32 of the Best Compact Overdrive Selection I now own all these Mini Fuzz Pedals featured here. Actually where the Decibelics The Reverend (Mini Expandora) has yet to be officially released - I should be receiveing the latest prototype any day now, and judging by Guillem Vilademunt’s previous Mini Masterpieces we have every reason to look forward to that one.

Other than that - everything is now in the collection - while this larger quest is nowhere near complete yet...

So I last did one of these back in 2020 - meaning that these ’Best of Overdrive’ run-downs seem to be a circa biennial affair. We’ve upped the numbers to 32 this year, while they represent barely a quarter of the overdrives I have in my reference collection - so there are obviously a lot of honourable mentions listed below - before the Final Thoughts section.

These types of exercises are incredibly tricky to strike the right balance of generally considered classic overdrive pedals and ...

NOTE - this article is too large (108 videos) to work properly on Mobile devices - make sure you view on Desktop or Laptop!

This is my largest ever article - and it will unlikely be repeated in this fashion - as this takes so long to compile - and the 108 Pedals / Videos included just take a little too long to load up on the screen. In any case it’s a pretty exhaustive run-down in rough order of preference of my favourite Compact Enclosure Pedals of Each Type.

For a few here there are ...

It was about time I did my roundup of favourite and preferred Mid-Size enclosure pedals. This means we’re covering Medium-Slim, Medium-Tall and Medium-Square enclosures - depending on my prevailing mindset - the Horizontal / Medium-Stout types I often group with ’Large’. For my Pedal-Chain in particular - space is very tight - and I really cannot accommodate anything beyond Medium-Square on those slots.

The thought process is deciding between Compact and Medium box solutions involves your ...

So I’ve had a lot of people ask me to explain the reasoning and science behind my 41-strong Pedal-Chain - how it came about, and how it has evolved.

The funny thing is that when I got back into guitar in 2016 - following the passing of my two biggest  musical heroes and inspirations - Bowie and Prince - I had intended to keep things very streamlined and simple. As a teenager I struggled to recreate the sounds of my guitar heroes and kind of threw in the towel after a few years of trying and...

This article is in part inspired by my features on ’Mini Pedals State of the Art’, and those various ’12 Degrees’ posts I did at the tail-end of last year.  Moreover I have had quite a few readers recently asking me for my preferred recommended mini pedals on various pedal-chain slots.

I last did this sort of exercise 4 years ago - where TC Electronic was kind of the dominant player - covering 8 of those 20 recommendations, with Mooer fairly close with 6 entries, Wampler with 2 and then ...

This is the 4th of my recent ’12 Degrees’ Series - this time moving beyond the boundaries of gain / saturation into the area of modulation. There are of course many more than the 12 modulations I have selected here - there are aliasing, ring modulation and lo-fi signal degeneration effects as well as more complex multi-combo effects, splicers and complex pattern modulators - including for instance the excellent recent Big Ear Albie. Of course the more obscure the category of ...

This is probably the most anticipated of my 12 Degrees roundups - and is a touch more complex and different to the other 2 in the series. Within each category here there can be a huge difference in character and output - for instance with Fuzz Faces going from quite mild to rather searing Meathead and Regulus VIII levels of aggression. So the gradual step up in gain per category doesn’t apply here. And because of circuit variations and differences in components and construction, each and every ...