I’ve known Holy Island Audio since the fabulous Stourbridge FX Expo back in 2022. And I’ve encountered Gwion a good 20 times throughout the intervening years - but somewhat embarrassingly still hadn’t landed some of those fantastic full-on sounding pedals.

It seemed that whenever I encountered Gwion at a show - he never had any stock of the very pedal I was after at the time. As for most small brands - Gwion operates on a Small Batch methodology - but more from an order-window perspective -...

We have the same core format here as the Black Mountain Volume and Roto Echo PT2399 Delay Pedals. This evolves the rotary wheel style of pedals first popularised by Classic Audio and Chase Bliss - especially for their respective Expression Rollers.

Black Mountain has evolved that concept further - with the Freewheel as the core of its pedal designs - with an even more robust and more accessible control wheel. Those pedals are truly precisions honed devices - with exceptional touch and feel....

I had kind of overlooked the Caroline Guitar Co. modulation pedals for a while, where the one that had always interested me the most was the Arigato Phaser - which took me a while to get to for whatever reason! I eventually landed that one near the start of this month!

I was so impressed with the Arigato - Phaser / Vibrato / Vibe that I decided that I should go for all 3 of the Caroline Modulation pedals - Arigato Phaser, Parabola Tremolo, and Somersault Lo-Fi Modulator.

One of my ...

The Huliaipole Anarchy Fuzz is a radical evolution of the classic Jordan Boss Tone circuit, meticulously re-engineered for unparalleled tonal flexibility and dynamic response. Moving away from a standard silicon setup, this fuzz utilizes a unique hybrid pairing of a Silicon 2SD1330 and a NOS military-grade Germanium 1T403 transistors, with the entire gain stage completely re-biased to perfectly accommodate the Germanium component. 

Vitalii has introduced a dedicated ’Texture’ control to ...

As introduced at the recent Leeds Pedal Show - Northern Stompboxes alone has the really attractive Limited White Colourway Edition of the Fuzz Fields Modulated Fuzz and the IT.. LFO Modulator.

I own and love my original Fuzz Fields Black Set, but would be heavily conflicted if I didn’t already own one of these - I would likely have a preference for the White Set if starting from scratch, but I don’t feel it enough to want to change my unit - I’ve already bonded with it! - and everything ...

I first covered ThunderTomate back in 2019 - when I did my ’Best of Spanish Guitar Pedals’ feature - and where ThunderTomate was seemingly in short supply by then - about to go on hiatus presumably. I particularly liked the look of the Dani Gomez / AC30 Custom which I featured in that article. But never came across one that was available for sale. A few ThunderTomate pedals landed on Reverb.com sporadically in and around 2019 - but not really the ones I was the keenest on, and then all of a ...

The IV BENCH is the second RhPf Nerd Lab resource I cover after the super handy Pedal Tone Maps. Diodes play such an important part in shaping the output of gain pedals in particular. They are of course also used for power management and various other electronic purposes - but our main interest in these is in Clipping Profiles - Vf Forward Voltages and Current Rise. There is another side to these Diodes which is more esoteric - while the Germanium Diodes are typically much better behaved than ...

I seemed to have missed the January Model Passes update - I believe I was on holiday at the time - those were the OD-2 Turbo OverDrive (1985-95), DM-2 Delay (1981-84), and DC-2 Dimension C (1985-89). I own 2 of those actual original pedals already, actually the DC-2W Waza variety, where I’ve still to get the DM-2/W - and I would really prefer that as a BBD type - but probably still also have that handy on my PX-1. It would actually be quite cool to get both DC-2 and DM-2 Models for my PX-1. ...

I’m known for my love of Multi-Gain boxes - and this is another great innovation in that area - a really smartly engineered gain machine - with all-analog sound generation and signal routing, but with some digital controls, and 3 Presets onboard.

You have two main Operational Modes - Series and Parallel, where the Series Mode is essentially Dry + Overdrive into Fuzz + Distortion, and Parallel is each of them piled on top of the other!

Controls - Level [digital], Filter : 1k > 16k [...