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 variant leans quite heavily into the Jan Ray side of things - with a warm, smooth, rich, dark and somewhat dense / compressed and sustaining core texture - which significantly enhances the output of Single-Coil pickups in particular. You will find that it’s mostly Single-Coil players that favour this format as it beautifully adds body to those tones, and slightly softens the highs - for a very elegant smooth and warm tonality.

I would file it with the Scott Henderson TWA SH9 and ...

August turned out a little bit different than expected. Not so many releases - as expected - but really busy regardless - with a number of Marquee Events and Articles throughout the month. With the king of the crop being the Extended Capacitor Primer - to which I’ve just added a further section on Capacitor Lifespan. Obviously I hit 15,000 followers on Instagram - which is a significant achievement - a really killer month all-round with some big articles - meaning I’m a little bit burned out ...

My friend Charlie has done a killer job of squeezing two of the best loved overdrives into a singular compact enclosure. This is pretty much a blow-by-blow remake of those High Velocity and Southerly Harmonic Overdrive circuits while they’ve been combined here onto the one circuitboard. The precision-honed exercise uses all the same parts values across the same high quality THT components. And in the process of combining those two circuits - I think there’s only a single component / resistor ...

Walrus Audio is next in line for one of my Brand Capsule Collection roundups / rounding exercises! - and as usual I swept up a few more longer-term targets along the way - so that I now own 11 Walruses! The ones I picked up in this latest sweep - included the 385 MKII Dynamic Overdrive, Kangra Filter Fuzz, and Slötvå - the 3 x Preset enhanced short-lived variation of the Slö Shimmer Reverb!

This means that I have just 2 ongoing targets - the fairly recent MKII Voyager Klon Klone, and the ...

Thorpy has always wanted to make a lower gain Germanium edged variant of his fantastic all-rounder Peacekeeper Overdrive - which is here rendered in a slightly more lower gain, lower range Peace2Keeper edition - but which benefits from the extraordinary clipping prowess of those dual Germanium OA90 Diodes. The standard version of this circuit I believe uses 1N4148 Silicon Diodes or similar - which already sound fantastic in that circuit - but where the output profile is now further elevated by ...

It’s about time I did a rundown on my MXR Pedals - where this episode was mostly triggered by the arrival of the Bass Synth - where I landed one of the first examples of those to land in the UK, landed with me on July 4th. I was doing some brand research on Reverb.com and I serendipitously came across the one pedal that had made it to Coda Music. It was already in someone’s cart - but evidently I completed the transaction quicker and it was mine.

I’ve adde 6 MXR’s to the collection this ...

It seems a long while since I first met the new owners of Mad Professor the Iconic Finnish Pedal Brands - Jussa and Mikko - at the London Synth and Pedal Expo back in March - where they announced their new MK2 Simble. They were sort of queuing up the pre-sales for that pedal - which started a week or two later, but it took quite the while for it to be officially launched and in stock.

I’ve been a big fan of Mad Professor pretty much from the start - especially as it’s somewhat connected to ...

I’ve been meaning to cover these KGR Harmony pedals for a while - since I first saw them on the Coast Sonic newsletter. If I recall correctly EarthQuaker Devices did some custom limited editions of its Plumes and Blumes Overdrive Pedals - in collaboration with the same KGR Harmony! I just can’t recall which of those mailers I saw first.

In any case these pedals are hand-made using traditional Japanese techniques including  Nanbu-tekki. and utilising a proper iron foundry to make those very ...