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This is undoubtedly likely to be one of the standout innovations introduced at this Summer NAMM show. It is evident that Wild Customs Guitars has been working on this project for a while. They have come up with a modular rotating drum system of pickups - where Seymour Duncan single size pickups - any variety - regular, rails, mini-humbucker etc can be attached to a capsule and snapped in as one of 3 pickup options per modular ’barrel’ / cartridge.

In effect you have 3 ...

I’ve actually been meaning to do this post for a while now - I’ve had several requests over the years to do a ’best of’ feature for Catalinbread - with some even wanting one specifically on delays - which actually only number 6 and therefore don’t quite merit a solo outing - although we’ll see. So this at last is that post - taking in the best of new and established, innovative and unique - across the 4 sub-categories - Foundation Overdrives | Delays and ...

Let me start straight up by saying that these two pedals are not entirely the same thing - but they are in essence Fuzz pedals which use envelope filtering to modulate the fuzz sound in various ways. There is a degree of overlap here also in the kind of tones you can get out of each of these - so I thought it would be handy to do a rough head-to-head comparison and lay out some of my preferences.

The Kangra has obviously just been announced and there are no details yet on the Walrus ...

It has to be said that Carl Martin - a long-standing Danish pedal-builder of high pro-gear repute - was starting to look somewhat fusty and old-fashioned there for a while. And while some brands would look to simply refresh their graphics and update things in a largely superficial manner - Carl Martin set to designing an entirely new compact enclosure for its Vintage Series of pedals.

The incumbent pedals were in rather uninteresting medium enclosures while the degree of innovation and...

So even this close to Summer NAMM - Boss still somehow feels it needs to unveil its further innovations in advance of that key product launch event. And following on from the superb recent debut of the 200 series - we see another 200-style enclosure - albeit for some reason numerically not associate with said series. The RC-10R is the looper I’ve been waiting for. You may recall in my ’Early Summer Pedal-Chain’ overview I mentioned that I was not particularly enamoured with or...

I can’t recall exactly what the catalyst was to this article, but I’ve been considering versatile medium enclosure Big Muff style fuzzes a lot of late. I have 3 of the best of these already in constant rotation (Update 4 now actually!) - i.e. one momentarily replacing the other on the #19 slot of my pedal-chain - and alternating a whole lot with the PLL style fuzzes right at this moment.

In any case during the process of cycling the Demon Pedals Parvati, Toneczar Vault and ...

The Chase for a Gemini III has sort of been my White Whale really - as I’ve been on the case for several years now - but the going prices of the 2011 originals were just stratospherically ridiculous - in fact there are a couple on Ebay right now - ’Used!’ For $1,800 and $1,975 respectively! I feel those prices are going to come down somewhat significantly now though as the new version - albeit in a larger medium-vertical enclosure - has a notably superior feature set. Whenever...

Readers of this blog will already know how much a fan I am of BYOC’s Crown Jewel Multidrive pedal - with its multitude of dials and switches - 4 gain stages in effect and clean blend circuit. I’ve said that this is not only likely the most versatile drive pedal out there currently, but also an essential educational tool for understating how different degrees of voltage, clipping, tone-shaping and Q-control impact on the output signal.

I wasn’t really that much ...

Just over a year ago I did a piece on ’9 Cool Phase Locked Loop Synth Harmonizing Oscillating Fuzz Pedals’ where I focused on the original Schumann PLL and the larger format full-feature/full-range replicas of said pedal. This included the EarthQuaker Devices Data Corrupter - which was on my wishlist for quite a while but I never ended up getting - for reasons which I will explain. There were a couple of pedals I overlooked in that overview - one which had relatively recently been ...

This article was sparked by a number of different recent occurrences - I’m obviously a big fuzz fan and consider these sorts of things all the time - with no less than 135 fuzz pedals now in my Fuzz collection or Fuzz Tone Library as I like to call it. In a series of conversations with Sof Tebboune of Expresso FX, the subject came up as to why I happened to have one or several fuzz pedals from one builder while none from another builder of equal if not greater presumed stature/renown.

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