New Pedals in the Class of 2025 Pedal-Chain Snapshot = 41

[OCTOBER]  = 9

[NOVEMBER] = 6

[MARCH] = 5

[SEPTEMBER] = 5

[AUGUST] = 4

[JANUARY] = 3

[FEBRUARY]  = 3

[APRIL] = 2

[JUNE] = 2

[MAY] = 1

[JULY] = 1

[A-Z by Brand]

1. Becos FX CompIQ Pro Yuna Soft Knee Blackmer VCA Studio Style Compressor [SEPTEMBER]
2. Blue Colander Grimrobe Dual Cascaded Super Rat [OCTOBER]
3. Blue FX Devices Fuzz Fields Ultimate Modulated Fuzz [SEPTEMBER]
4. Boss RT-2 Rotary Ensemble Leslie / Rotary Speaker

So back in the 70’s EHX’s Mike Matthews commissioned both Howard Davis and Bob Myer to make the next generation of Big Muff - using the newly release OpAmps / IC’s rather than the individual quartet of Transistors. Each engineer came up with their own version - and Mike picked out the Howard Davis one for production - which then became the 1978 EHX OpAmp Big Muff.

Meanwhile Bob Myer’s version sat abandoned and forgotten in the mist of time - until Josh Scott and Daniel Danger came upon it ...

This is the second time EQD has collaborated with KGR Harmony’s Japanese Iron Foundry - famous for its relief-design wrought-iron / cast-iron enclosures. And here we get the most compact variant of the Sunn O))) Life Pedal do date - essentially the V4 edition of that circuit - named the ’HalfLife Fer’.

Only 200 of these were made - and they barely lasted an hour and half. So this is more my documenting the provenance of this circuit than putting up yet another promo feature. It’s all ...

A first ever analog circuit from Strymon is a JFET style Tube Power Amp recreation with unique Sag circuit to replicate that sort of mis-biased gating you get from those vintage source amps.

Controls - Drive, Level, Bright : Off/On, Sag.

Strymon put it best themselves in the following paragraphs :

"Fairfax began as an engineering experiment, initially inspired by the original Garnet Amplifiers Herzog® tube drive unit designed for Randy Bachman in 1965. Our analog guys decided to try...

The blurb says something about the Pillbug being inspired by both the Boss CS-2 Compressions Sustainer, as well as the Ross Compressor - while those are 2 slightly different technologies - the first being a FET type, and the latter an OTA type. I’m guessing they mean that they have captured the warmth of the Boss CS-2 along with the added brightness of the Ross Compressor - which in turn was just 2 pars away from the MXR Dynacomp Compressor

• Pillbug Controls - Level, Attack, Sustain.
• CS-2

And here we have the GRAND FINAL- with all 36 Award Winners from the Group Stages - across all 5 categories!

The first two places have kind of been obvious for a while, where the 3rd / BRONZE position was actually the hardest to decide on - it was between the eventual recipient - the Tubesteader Gainlord, Boss’s XS-100 Poly Shifter, Blue FX Devices Fuzz Fields and Gamechanger’s Motor Synth - all of whom would have been worthy runners-up - while in the end I went for the one that overall ...

DOD is obviously a company that doesn’t do things by half - and rather than just a straight-up reissue cash-in on that JHS hype. Instead DOD went back to the drawing board and massively re-designed the circuit to make it even more powerful and versatile!

The original circuit controls were - Level, Low EQ, High EQ, Gain. And the new pedal ups the ante with 3 separate parallel blendable circuits - Behaved, Bad, and Badder - where the 3-way switch allows you to target 2 of those at a time - ...

In many ways this is the most straightforward category with singular award nominees - GOLD, SILVER and BRONZE.

It’s the second smallest category after Distortions - and the one where I own the least number of pedals in proportion to the whole - just 10 out of these 26.

The order pretty much set itself - with the Cornerstone Nucleo being the clear winner from the start. I’m so impressed with every aspect of that pedal - it’s a perfect Trifecta of Design, Feaures and Playability - pretty ...

What we have here is a killer Trifecta of potent shoegazer-enhanced compact editions - where two of them are fully Stereo capable.

Conventional wisdom would decree the order of : Treble Overload > Moonbeam Phaser > Dream Station.

While for shoegazer optimisation you need to reverse the order and put the reverb at the front of the chain - as several demoers have done below. I quite like Ian Pritchard’s setup too - with the Dream Station in the middle, and Thee Treble Overlaod in front! ...