2025 Best of the Best Pedals of the year

teachingmachines.co.uk

Controls - Input : Line Level / Guitar Level, Components Wheels #1-#11 - each with options numbered 0-9: #1 Boost| #2 Opamp Gain | #3 Waveform Peak Diode Clipping | #4 Waveform Dip Diode Clipping | #5 Tone : Bass > Treble | #6 Octave Fuzz Drive | #7 Octave Fuzz Intensity | #8 PLL Harmonizing Fuzz | #9 Negative > Positive Bias | #10 Output Diode Clpping | #11 Output Treble-Cut, Volume Kmob, Output : Line Level / Guitar Level.

This is such a worthy Grand Champion - I've loved it from the first encounter. This is a very unique, innovative and versatile pedal - beautifully conceived and expertly executed. There are so many killer sound on board - that this really puts every other pedal released in 2025 in the shade to a degree - while you can see from this selection - that the standard was incredibly high this year - and if we took the FuzzBillion out of consideration there would be several pedals completing for the top honours. But this year there could only be the FuzzBillion - this is a pedal design benchmark for the ages - and wonderful mechanical marvel to boot! Congrats and props to the Teaching Machines team - Leon, Frank, Luke and Matt - and my good friend Grindle - who's engineering prowess delivered this final production version - every way brilliant - in a billion different ways!

www.cornerstonemusicgear.com/

Controls - Mode : Room [lo-fi], Reactor [vintage], Hall [normal], Blend [volume], Modulation [rate], Air [pitch], Flux [speed], Decay [pre-delay], Tone [diffuse], Freeze-Pitch [freeze-volume], Rocker Switch : Live Panel / F2 Secondary / Presets [1|2|3], Bypass Footswitch [save], Freeze Footswitch [preset 1-3].

The Nucleo has been a total triumph this year - easily one of my all-time favourite Reverb pedals - maybe The all-time favourite Reverb Pedal. I was supposed to be bringing the Hotone Verbera onto this slot - to give that a thorough going over too. But so good is the Nucleo that I really did not want to take it off the board. The BigSky MX has mostly sat idle since this Nucelo arrived. It's the perfect combination of Design, Features, Function and Format - and it sounds wholly gorgeous all the time - is very intuitive and a genuine joy to deploy. In any other year this might have been the overall champion - but however impressive the Nucleo is - the FuzzBillion impressed my more. What can I say - I really love the both of them - they are wholly at the top of the tree for what pedals can deliver!

tubesteader.com/products/gainlord

Controls - Lower Blue Plexi Style Channel 1 } Volume, Treble, Mid, Bass, Bright Switch, Gain; Upper Red JCM800 Channel 2 } Volume, Treble, Mid, Bass, Bright Switch, Gain; Tone Bypass for Direct Out on side of pedal.

This was actually the most hard-fought placing - in the end between the Boss’s XS-100 Poly Shifter, Blue FX Devices Fuzz Fields,  Gamechanger’s Motor Synth, and this Tubesteader Gainlord. I deliberated long and hard on the merits of each - and the final pariring was between the Gainlord and the Fuzz Fields - both exceptional pedals with severel gears of live playback. On a different day the Fuzz Fields would probably have taken it - where interestingly it's 'It' LFO Modulator Accessory turned out to be surplus to requriements, while the Gainlord's FS-2L Remote Switch turned out to be essential as it delivers in effect a 3rd Channel - meaning you have 3 gears of operation - where the Fuzz Fields has 4. The battle in the end kind of came down to the accessories - as probably without them the Fuzz Fields would have won - but the sort of lack of full integration and granularity on the 'It' LFO Modulator ended up slightly penalising the Fuzz Fields. That's not t say the Boss XS-100 and Gamnechanger Motor Pedal aren't brilliant too - by different criteria each of those could have won the third place position - but overall I think I derived the most satisfaction from the Gainlord - while it was a very close run thing in the end - props to both Olly at Tubesteader and Archie and Phil from Blue FX Devices - very well done indeed!

The fact that we already had a placing from the Fuzz category - also counted in the Gainlord's favour - while I dearly love both of those pedals - which are for sure at the top tier of the best pedals released this year!

3 AWARD WINNERS

• Cornerstone Nucleo Power Station Hall Reverb
• PastFx Echo 600 [EHX Deluxe Memory Man]
• Colortone ZeroSum Dual Head Delay

8 AWARD WINNER

• Boss RT-2 Rotary Ensemble
• Boss XS-100 Poly Shifter
• Butterfly Effects Dobbo Granular Playground
• Colortone Pedals VibroVerb Stereo LFO Multi-Modulator
• Gamechanger Audio Electro-Mechnical Multi-Mode Motor Synth
• Kernom Elipse Hybrid Modulation Playground / Multi-Modulator
• MXR Bassline / Bass Synth
• PastFX Deluxe Elastic Mattress,

10 AWARD WINNERS

• Blind Panic Devices Reactor Fuzz
• Blue FX Devices Fuzz Fields Ultimate Modulated Fuzz
• Coriolis Grissom Young Dual Fuzz MKII (Gemini III+)
• Fjord Fuzz Midnattssol Fuzz-Vibe
• Great Eastern FX Focus Fuzz Deluxe
• Hangman fx Atomic World Ender Multi-Mode Fuzz
• Redheard Effects Bearded Vulture Octave Fuzz
• Spaceman Effects Sputnik I Silicon Fuzz
• Teaching Machines FuzzBillion Combination Wheel Gain-Shaper
• Wampler Cryptid Multi-Fuzz

6 AWARD WINNERS

• Blue Colander Grimrobe Dual Cascaded Super Rat
• Fortin Meshuggah Signature Distortion
• Krozz Devices RoyalBreaker Marsh-Rat
• Muir Audio Silicon Steel Distortion
• Sinvertek MGAT-5 Soldano SLO-100 SRAA
• Solar Chug Lite Distortion