My close association with Thorpy started back in late September of 2018 - at the now defunct Olympia UK Guitar Show. He was the first pedal maker I reached out to, and the first I connected with.

Since then ThorpyFX Pedals have become my 3rd most populous selection after Boss and Drunk Beaver. Those 3 brands alone contribute over 200 pedals to my reference collection!

The fact that I’m now at 31 ThorpyFX Pedals is a major milestone - and features every mainline MKII pedal Thorpy has made. ...

This has turned out to be something of a Thorpy month! - following on from the recent Manson Supermassive Black Fuzz and 3 Thorpy acquisitions this month - indeed the Supermassive is also engineered by Thorpy!

I thought I should do a quick retrospective of pedals and projects that Thorpy has been involved in.

I selected my favourite pedal from those 4 brands (some singular options!) :

• Redbeard Effects : Bearded Vulture Direct Drive with Octave
• Victory Amps : V1 The Jack Guthrie

So we have Santiago Alvarez (ex Marshall), Tommi Otsavara (ex Darkglass Electronics), and Torsten Woelle (ex Hughes & Kettner) in a very formidable new partnership - with an excellent mid-priced full-range offering! Quite a pedigree really in terms of the principals involved.

According to Andertons these are mostly at the £169 mark, with two of the compacts being just £149, and then the Tube Preamp / Tube Driver going for £269 - all announced, but not yet in stock. Actually GuitarGuitar got...

I’m a huge fan of the Univox / Shin-ei Super-Fuzz and all its derivations, and have around 30 examples of that genre to date in my reference collection. And this Adventure SuperFuzz is right up at the top tier of those. Super-Fuzzes don’t normally have this many controls. In fact the original 1968 model had just 2 knobs (Balance / Volume, and Expander / Gain), and a single EQ slider switch to deliver either Flat or Scooped Mids. The Super-Fuzz has this lovely blooming richly harmonic output ...

I’ve been wanting to get stuck into Fuzz Imp’s pedals for a while - and as the stars recently aligned, a deal was struck - and 3 of the finest crossed the Atlantic!

I’ve actually been following Justus Gash for several years now - I always have my hands fairly full - while it was only a matter of time before I established proper contact and started my Fuzz Imp odyssey.  These 3 pedals always suggested themselves - I’ve been particularly keen on getting in the Creature - while the other two ...

This circuit was supposedly based on the Ace Tone Fuzz Master FM-2 Professional Fuzz Machine - which was in essence just another re-badged Shin-ei / Univox Super-Fuzz that Jamie got his hands on. The original run of this EQD Pedal lasted from 2015 to 2018. And it’s long been a target for me - but the price / condition / timing factor had never quite hit properly until now.

I love the fact that EQD are reissuing their past glories - I still have a few more EQD Fuzzes tp get - based on my ...

So this article was inspired by the fairly recent Leeds Pedal Show attendance - where indeed I picked up a number of these. Namely - the Emmergy FX Slowdriver, Fredric Effect Demon Fuzz V2, Funny Little Booxes Caught By The Fuzz, and SoundLad Liverpool’s Hungry Beaver. I had also intended to pick up the Pyroglyphs and Flow Decoder from Tom @ Glowfly Pedals - while alas he had to cancel last minute as he had become quite ill.

The Buzzing Bugs BB02 and Demiurge Intsturments Chroma Drive I’ve ...

So this is the 3rd and last of my Boss Gain-ology articles - and he one that’s likely to spark the most controversy. The grey enclosure ones are a given obviously, and the PW-2 Power Driver is well known for being Boss’s sort of take on the Big Muff - during the Grunge era. Notable the Power Driver only had a circulation of 6 months or so before it got pulled - so Boss’s shortest lived pedal!

My controversial choice here is the Lead Channel of the SD-2 Dual Overdrive - which very much ...

So these 14 are some of the pedals that continue to evade capture for me. Most of these are discontinued and were only made in  very limited numbers. Some of these are small batch productions - like the GNI Octa Fuzz and Iron Ether FrantaBit. And some are also impossible to get outside their country of manufacture. Some of these I’ve been chasing for nearly a decade so far.

Many of you will be familiar with my quest for the Blakemore Effects Deus Ex Machina OpAmp Muff - where I tracked down...