The new CTC Falcon is a simple and elegant 3 dial - Output | Tone | Volume overdrive pedal with a ’55 / ’61 Toggle Switch which allows you to select between a 5E3 Tweed Deluxe and 6G2 Brownface Princeton circuit. It’s great to have two legendary Fender amp replicas within the one compact pedal - should have a broad appeal.
Collaborations seem to be the order of the day nowadays and this one between band Datachoir and OBNE is another pretty cool one. Ostensibly a dual circuit reverse mode with Delay and Reverb - where the Reverse feed can be assigned either before or after. Very few of these were made and the first batch sold out almost immediately!
DBA’s new pedal is something of an acquired noise-maker. It features a sort of side-chain Effects Loop where you can loop in any number of other pedals and apply a double dose of feedback via massive dial, there’s also a Phaser effect and a sort of Fuzz onboard for maximum sonic mangling. You have to be careful how you apply this to keep it musical!
Tom Majeski of Cooper FX obviously had a tall order to match the success of his Generation Loss pedal - and so he’s gone and made the most tweakable hardware pitch-shifters available with a 16 Step Sequencer onboard and no less than 200 user-definable parameters! I possibly should have included this one in my recent Glitch pedal roundup...
Demon Pedals have opened up pre-orders for probably my current favourite Dumble-style overdrive pedal. You get a full roster of dials and clipping switches for maximum versatility - and early demos are great. It’s a touch pricey, but goes to the top of that category wishlist - I will look to add in the new year.
I already have Rick Matthews’ excellent The Whaler Fuzz - but this is a different beast - OpAmp-based with full 3-band EQ for punching through in a mix. It’s limited to only 99 units and the first batch of 50 sold out almost immediately - so you need to move quickly if you want this.
I’ve been following Lawrence Petross for a while now - mostly courtesy of Phillip McKnight, and his Sixty 8 and Eighty 7 pedals have always impressed. I love the triple footswitches on the new larger Deluxe format Sixty 8 - albeit part of me still wants 3-band EQ, yet it’s still on my wishlist though!
Joyo have announced this new Uzi High Gain Distortion Pedal which for me is the most interesting from their new quality-focused £50 Revolution R Series. It features 3-band EQ along with ’Bias’ dial - for UK / USA voicing profiles - a sort of Contour / EQ Shift dial as such.
I featured the previous incarnation in last year’s Ring Modulation roundup, and this pedal is in most ways a significant enhancement over that one with much more expansive filtering and envelope following - even though it does loose the second ’Follow’ footswitch from the original. This is now one of the most capable Ring Modulators available and well worth a look-in.
We’ve been teased on Facebook for this one for a while now - seems like months. A new Sky Fi or combined Delay + Reverb was always on the cards, we just weren’t exactly sure of the new parameters. What we get is a new name alongside 90’s rack reverb with octave up (Shimmer) or down options and Digital, BBD and Oil Can style Delays with other usual NEO features.
by Stefan Karlsson
