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 what is often my favourite category - the many wonderful flavours of fuzz - and we have some hugely innovative pedals in the selection this year - one of these may even be my pedal of the year!

So there are 24 in this year’s selection - where I’m just missing the Collision Devices TARS, Fender Shields Blender, JAM Pedals Octaurus, KMA Machines Mandrake, Reeves Electro Facet IZ, and Unsound Circuitry Kato Glitch Fuzz - where I will attempt to add most of those to the reference ...

I’ve had the Moho on my board for an entire wonderful week so far - and it’s been nothing but delightful from the very first encounter. I occasionally use the phrase ’a joy to deploy’ and that’s never been more apt than in these circumstances.

It’s not just that the Moho delivers high fidelity - it truly sounds magnificent every which way you point those dials - with all the verve, ebb and flow, fuzzy feel and full flavour you could ever desire. It has some degree of guitar volume gain ...

So this post is a little academic in some ways as many of these are already sold out - so more to celebrate these pedals’ existence rather than any sort of promotion really. Only 10 of the Halloween Bat, and then 5 of each of the other varieties were made - while I think Vitalii could have made a lot more.

There’s always some cool seasonal limited / special editions at this time of year - I’ve already posted up the excellent TWA Octoverdrive - and I shared JAM Pedals brilliant custom ...

A reader asked me to pick out some of my all-time favourite fuzzes - which are legion actually - just far too many to include in a single rundown. So we settled on doing somewhat less well known favourite fuzzes - under the guise of ’Secret Weapon Fuzzes’. These are mostly somewhat under the radar classics - several of which are discontinued, but all of which deliver distinct superior tones.

Beyond these being Secret Weapon Fuzzes there was no other specific theme - so we get a variety of ...

July was punctuated by two very significant events - Doug Tolley’s Witney Pedal Party on July 1st, and Phil Steere’s Brighton Guitar Show and FX Expo on July 15th - where I covered both of those in fine detail. Both were seminal events for different reasons, and while we were relatively few at Witney - we got to witness a truly legendary performance by David Rainger - which doubled up as about the best pedal demo I’ve yet / ever experienced - David was truly on fire - and the audience - we ...

I’m not usually big on hyperbole - while this V2 Gleam might just be the most potent silicon fuzz pedal made to date - where its 8 controls incredibly deliver pretty authentic FZ-1, MKI, MKII and FF voicings and then some. There’s an additional 8-Bit Fuzz preset in the manual which I will allude to later.

A lot of the smarts here is down to those 2 x 3-way Impedance and Tone toggle-switches which combine so intricately to perfectly sculpt the pedal’s output to match those classic voicing ...

EHX originally released its Satisfaction Maestro FZ-1 Fuzz Tone take back in 2014 I believe. I acquire me own copy of that a few years later - in the guise of the JHS Pedals Modified version of that. JHS used to do a number of EHX Modded pedals - and I own several of those - including all the Modded Big Muffs that Josh Scott did. Once JHS reached a new level of popularity - those modifications were discontinued, so I’ve switched over to Alchemy Audio for those types of editions nowadays.

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