The following article is composed of an assortment of essentially unrelated Overdrives which have recently caught my eye - albeit a couple of these have been around for a while.

The only common element here is that each of these has a distinctive bite to its output and correspondingly interesting textural character.

3 of these are multi-stage clipping drives, where two have separate controls for 2 of their stages - namely the AJ Peat Screaming Flamingo and Balaguer Fission ...

I really wanted the Wampler Ratsbane to have its time in the spotlight - as it’s truly a great example of the genre - albeit delivered with a TL071 ompamp in place of the more typical LM308 or OP07 variant.

As always, it’s not the only game in town - and in fact is my 3rd min Rat pedal following my BYOC Li’l Mouse and Mooer Black Secret. The BYOC sounds fantastic texturally, but is a little lacking in output - which is why generally I favoured the Black Secret on most...

It’s quite obvious that I’m a very significant Rat fan - as this is the 23rd pedal of that variety to be added to the collection. It was evident almost immediately that this was another particularly great take on the genre - with beautiful harmonic bloom of distortion across multiple modes and voicings.

At its core this is very much a classic Rat - with the standard Volume, Filter (Hi-Cut) and Distortion controls. But then we have two further tone-shapers courtesy of a 3-...

I would like to start by apologising to those builders who didn’t get a pedal featured in Wednesday’s final 32 Key Guitar Effects Pedal Types article. Know that I hold you all in the highest of esteem - and that said overview is/was simply a somewhat temporary and fleeting snapshot of my current preferences on that day - with a particular emphasis towards versatility and variety delivered by a single pedal. So some pedals are typically more narrowly focused and specialist, while ...

I’ve always loved granular delays - those disjointed skittery delay taps - since my very first encounter with the Montreal Assembly Count to Five. However I’ve oft times struggled to dial in the right balance of texture and effect to ensure that it fully delivers its character - without unduly interrupting or overly colouring the flow of music.

It can be quite tricky at times to dial such effects in fully musically - and some patience is definitely required for the process ...

It was only natural that the Compact Format Preferred Versions feature should follow the Mini examples. Again largely inspired by the recent ’12 Degrees’ projects.

Once more I’ve had a change of mind on some of the candidates and the preferred examples are slightly different to those previous references. Obviously new pedals have arisen, and priorities and preferences can shift fairly regularly based on prevailing mood.

That said, most of these are long-term...

So Reverb.com has just announced which limited edition pedal collaborations go on sale today - Tuesday 23rd February - to further celebrate the imminent release of ’The Pedal Movie’. The first two pedals went on sale last November and sold out pretty instantaneously. 1000 of Chase Bliss Audio + Zvex collaboration Bliss Factory Fuzz, and 1000 of Death By Audio + EarthQuaker Devices collaboration Time Shadows Subharmonic Multi-Delay Resonator.

Both pedals were rather original...

This article is in part inspired by my features on ’Mini Pedals State of the Art’, and those various ’12 Degrees’ posts I did at the tail-end of last year. Moreover I have had quite a few readers recently asking me for my preferred recommended mini pedals on various pedal-chain slots.

I last did this sort of exercise 4 years ago - where TC Electronic was kind of the dominant player - covering 8 of those 20 recommendations, with Mooer fairly close with 6 entries...

Carsten Pinkle’s Klirrton Manufaktur is thus far best known for its Killer Grindstein HM-2 style Death Metal Buzzsaw Pedal - which also incidentally remains high on my wishlist and has featured several times already on this site. That pedal contains 2 blendable circuits / voicings - the core HM-2 Grind, and a bass-heavy ’BottomShaker’ preamp.

So many players in fact loved the ’BottomShaker’ preamp element, that Carsten, after much consideration and some ...

DigiTech’s latter sister brand DOD has delivered a number of pedal greats over the years, and since its foundation in 1973 by David Oreste Di Francesco. A lot of people focus on the early editions / 200 Series - while I’ve taken a slightly broader overview here - with the one concession really being the original 250 Overdrive/Preamp. Elsewhere I’ve gone for pretty much the latest viable editions - including the Blue reissue of the 201 Phasor - which also had Grey and Yellow ...