July was a tough month for me! Plenty going on for sure - and I had a particularly traumatic Sunday a couple of weeks back - when I was unable to get any sound out of my pedal-chain for the best part of that day. At the end of that I retired incredibly frustrated and kind of distraught - which zapped whatever remaining energy I had - and left me entirely shattered.

After a night’s sleep - I turned up  a little sharper on the following day - and was able to fairly quickly and systematically ...

Brighton is normally one of the easiest shows to attend - usually just an hour Journey from London Victoria to Brighton Station. But on this day - when I got to Victoria - it had been announced that all trains to Brighton had been cancelled owing to a landslide near Purley.

I was initially advised to head for Hove instead (Littlehampton service) as the nearest destination to Brighton. I had arrived around 06:30 at Victoria with a view to catching the 06:59 train - which should have got me into ...

So I’ve very much decided that the principal application for this circuit is as a fixer and tone-enhancer. I’m sure some will use it as an always-on boost, and others still might crank the Gain Boost and use it as an Overdrive, while my feeling is that the best use for this pedals is as a precision-honed tone-enhancer.

So this means that where you have a pedal in the chain which is not quite delivering for you in how you want it to sound - say it’s missing a little of this or that, and is a...

This was funnily something of af 2022 Stourbridge Pedal Expo Reunion of sorts - where Audiostorm, Bleak District Electric, Emmergy FX, Fredric Effects, and Goliath FX were all present at that inaugural Pedal Expo. There are marked similarities between the two venues and events - both are  similar sort of Mill House style building set within a kind of packing district and both relatively near to a waterway / canal. And both had a really friendly vibe to them. It’s incredible how far we’ve come ...

Here it’s the turn of the new distortion pedals this year. Where I own all but 7 here :

• Crazy Tube Circuits Heatseeker Enhanced Full Stack Marshall style Preamp
• God City Instruments Brutalist Distortion
• Krozz Devices RoyalBreaker Extended Rat style Distortion
• Noise Engineering Dystorpia Fuzz/Distortion
• Soldano Super Lead Overdrive Plus
• UAFX Anti 1992 High Gain Amp
• UAFX Knuckles ’92 Rev F Dual Rec Amplifier

So of this selection of 34 I own 27 :

Finalists

• Audiostorm Grand

So we were back in Bristol once more for the superb Wassup Nerds!? 2 Show - much expanded and in new BIMM Institute Venue in the Stokes Croft area of that city. Said area, is a little way out of the centre of the city, and consists mostly of take-away restaurants seemingly, a few pubs, and is heavily saturated with Vegan and Vegetarian options - so will likely suit the more fussy eaters!

Unusually for me, I hadn’t done any research on that area in advance - where for my lunch break - I ...

Showrunner extraordinaire Phil Steere above (at the show entrance), AKA PedalPatch Head Honcho.

What a wonderful show!

Just as good as the inaugural one, in fact by several measures even better!

These shows are really like family reunions for me nowadays - I know most everybody on the pedal scene now and seemed to be mostly warmly welcomed into their company. I was up really early on the Saturday - in fact when I walked in at 08:15 only Boss and NRG Effects were close to having set ...

So I typically do the metal pedal roundup in and around Autumn, while now seems to be a decent time to do a recap - as quite a large sway has changed since I last did this exercise back in 2022. And we have had a number of really strong new contenders - which each sounds fantastic, and overall heralds a kind of new era of heavy metal pedals with even more range and dynamics.

There are 10 New Pedals since 2022’s rundown, more than a quarter of the previously listed pedals have been swapped /...

Lydia Sean Mandrake is not one to follow the crowd or do things by halves. This Grand Classic Passion Project has way exceeded its Kickstarter timeline - but is all the better for it, and is overall a vast improvement on the original concept - acquiring an improved control topology, and a couple of key accessories along the way.

At the same time, Lydia developed Audiostorm’s own automated ’pick-and-place’ manufacturing assembly line, utilising numerous 3D-printed parts. Turns out Lydia is ...