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

October was a super busy month - one of the busiest ever - with such a scope and scale and body of work covered - I’m quite shattered as a result!

We had of the penultimate Events of the year :

• The 2nd Woking Boutique Guitar Show
• Kempton Park London International Guitar Show

And around one dozen key posts  as below also :

• Letter from Dr.No
• Teaching Machines FuzzBillion Component Combinations Wheels Gain-Shaper
• Hangman fx DAGG’R Dynamic Auto-Gain/Gate Mighty Morphing Gain-Ramper

This lates Vox-Conqueror-inspired pedal covers the Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour and White Albums. Interestingly ’Magical Mystery Tour’ is my brother’s favourite Beatles Album, while the White Album is my own second-favourite Beatles work. My favourite is of course ’Revolver’ - which is covered by Aclam’s previous Dr.  Roberts pedal. And my 3rd favourite Beatles Album - Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is ably covered by Aclam’s Mocker pedal.

Controls - Volume, Drive : Attack <> ...

33 slots updated this year - #2, #3, #4, #5, #7, #9a, #9b, #10, #11, #12, #15a, #15b, #15c, #16, #17, #18, #19, #20, #22a, #22b, #23, #24, #25, #26, #29, #30, #31, #32, #33, #34, #36, #38, and #41.

There’s been a fair amount of re-routing and re-organising this year - which you should be able to pick via the pattern of changes. The introduction of the stereo Poly Amplitude introduced the biggest change to the board order - to get th most out of that format!

I try to limit acquisitions /...

So this is the big one - all the top performers from the year in one selection.

We’ve already covered :

• 35 Boost & Overdrive Pedal Finalists
• 34 Distortion Pedal Finalists
• 32 Fuzz Pedal Finalists
• 38 Modutility Pedal Finalists
• 25 Delay and Reverb Pedal Finalists

Total Overall Finalist Selection of 164 Pedals!

Distilled down to the final favourites selection, where I own 27 of them, and will try to secure the final missing ones next year :

• Coffee Shop Pedals London Fog Tape Delay -

In the light of a number of new arrivals this year, namely :

• Coriolis Hail To The King Ultimate Edition Dual BluesBreaker Overdrive
• Menatone MenaWatt Hiwatt DR103 style Preamp
• Menatone Wreck’T Trainwreck Express style Preamp
• Tubesteader ROY Twin Channel Vox AC30 Top Boost style Tube Preamp

It seemed about the right time to do an update of my original April 2023 16 Iconic Amps and Pedals Article. This has had some tweaks along the way, and on the 9th slot still features a pedal yet to ...

This one has been a long time coming - where you can blame the delinquency of UPS and the UK Customs Division for its one week overdue arrival! Fortunately it’s so well worth the wait!

Readers will know that I’m a big fan of the Vox AC30 sound - and how that is deployed by Brian May and U2’s The Edge in particular, but also for some of those wonderful Beatles tracks. Admittedly the earlier Beatles tracks utilised the Vox UL730 amp in the main, while later Beatles and solo output from John ...

November has been a crazy month! With such a flurry of activity from around the middle of the month onwards. So many companies took full advantage of Black Friday promotions - and the smartest of them started early, and extended their campaign through to the 2nd or 6th of December - in order to be able to take advantage of 2 pay packets!

If you started your Black Friday sales with just a week to go or less - then alas you’re bang out of touch with the new paradigm shift. The early bird ...

So the current Voxy & Plexi slots are #18 and #19, while the first formation occurred back at the start of 2018 - with the Bearfoot EGDM on slot #15, and the MI Effects Super Crunch Box V2 on slot #17 - we’ve obviously come a long way since then! That original pairing had a very decent 2 year innings. Which was actually a few month more than the enduringly popular Pettyjohn Electronics pairing. Of all of these - those 2 pairs have endured the longest, with the Menatone TBIAC + KOB duo putting ...