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...

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...

As a strictly non Bass Guitar owner/player I rarely feature specifically Bass gear, and when I do - it is typically from Darkglass as I really admire what they do - in terms of their signal processing, aesthetics, and smart modern technology and interfaces.

I have not seen any guitar demos of this unit yet - I don’t believe any are official yet, while Darkglass say it’s great for Guitars too - but this was obviously developed very specifically for Nolly - for his own ...

The amount of different versions of Helix is now almost getting to pandemic levels - with Line 6 offering up yet another variant - in the guise of the HX Stomp XL.

The stats for this really could not be any simpler - as what you are getting is essentially the exact same HX Stomp Unit - with largely all the same functionality and screen - but with 5 more footswitches - for more Stompbox mode switches, and the ability to select up to 4 different Snapshots.

All the ports on this ...

I’m not sure how happy Strymon is going to be here as Walrus Audio seems to have near enough copied their Iridium Pedal formula - blow-for-blow - they’re even priced at the exact same $399 level!

And while there are some slight differences - most of the advantages seem to lean towards the ACS1 - obviously smaller footprint - and a little more surface-accessible functionality.

The differences in real terms are quite small - but it’s neat on the ACS1 in ...

This is one of those articles that’s been a long-time coming, and where I needed to spend a rather large chunk of time getting fully under the skin of the pedal in question - the really quite superb, but also somewhat slightly flawed Boss GT-1000 CORE Guitar Effects Processor.

I must start by stating that I came into this project with somewhat lofty expectations, and there was some degree of naivety to my beliefs as to what was contained within this pedal, and more importantly ...

This post was triggered by a number of readers asking me for my take on the recent Modular Synth Multi-FX phenomenon. Where I composed a fairly long-form answer for one Joe D - and promised to make that part of a more circumspect review (this one!) where I compared the different approaches of Canada’s Empress Effects and the more recently highly newsworthy Poly Effects of Australia.

I myself am very much your typical guitar pedal enthusiast - who deploys a rather insanely complex...

I’ve long mentioned that we’re living through the second golden age of effects pedals (some say ’Diamond Age’’), and as good as things have been - 2019 took it all to an entirely new level of excellence. I don’t recall any previous year where we’ve had quite the same degree of innovation and so many ingeniously appealing pedals - this year has been so fast and furious - it’s been difficult to keep up at times.

I noted in my End of Year ...

This is my 3rd re-write from scratch of this article - I keep coming across new details! This was initially inspired by the arrival of Mooer’s E7 series - first represented by the Tone Capture GTR, and now by the very recent 7-Mode/7-Presets E7 Synth pedal which continues that distinctive new enclosure format - which is in someways an evolution from Mooer’s Micro-PreAmps - with the same 5 mini knobs and push-button topology, but here accompanied by 7 Mode/Preset LEDs positioned down...

One of the areas I have yet to get properly stuck into is making recordings from my Stereo Rig - up until now I had been planning on some sort of 3 Mic setup with one per Cab, and an ambient Room Mic. This approach would have involved all manner of additional hardware boxes and cabling, signal-fine-tuning, re-balancing and mix down, and while there are a couple or so decent Stereo Amp/Cab Simulators already on the market - nothing has held any appeal for me until now.

Strymon in their ...