Beetronics’ new fuzz celebrates the tones of Brazil’s 1970’s Tropicalia Movement. With 3 different flavours of Buzz, Fuzz and Drive across default Buzz or Tropical Mode.
The Flavour switch helps you define your core tone and texture - which you can then fine-tune with Hi and Lo knobs - and engage the Tropical Mode to shave off some of the low-end.
Controls - Loud (Volume), Flavour : Polen (sagged low gain buzz) / Nectar (round high gain fuzz) / Honey (sweet high gain drive), Buzz (Fuzz)...
The Modutility roundup combines Modulation, Utility and Pitch type pedals - it also includes Multi-FX and Multi-Modulation pedals of course. Some years this selection is relatively sparse - while this year it’s totally chock-a-block! In fact it was a struggle to whittle the Longlist down - and inevitably some pedals I wanted to feature did not make the cut - including the Endorphin.es Ghost Pedal Multi-FX and Subdecay Prometheus 3 Dual Super Filter.
I still feel that this selection of 26 is...
And so to my roundup of the best gear of the year - apologies of course if I’ve overlooked one of your favourites - and note again that this year I’ve split out Boost & Overdrive - and Distortion separately - as there are so many new pedals that it’s tough to fit them all into a single summary overview. Some of these pedals are incredibly extended range - and if I’ve used them more on the distortion side - you will find those listed in the very next Distortion Rundown article - like say the...
This whole year has occurred at such breakneck speed and volume - with so much happening all day and every day - that I have perpetually felt like I was always in the process of catching up and never quite had time to catch my breath as such. I’ve taken just one whole weekend off in the whole year - and am as close to burn-out as I’ve ever been. Every time I attended a Guitar or Pedal show I was up all night doing the write-up - average time for those articles was / is around 36 hours give or ...
When I first started doing the visual for this I thought I had amassed 10 Beetronics pedals to date - but it turns I’m one short of that milestone - it still kind of made sense to mark the occasion of the Custom Shop Nectar’s arrival - which is probably my favourite Custom Shop edition to date. I had to wade through 3 batches to pick out that one - I wanted metal knobs - and a pinkish hue to the core - and the one pictured really captured my imagination. I quite liked my SeaBee at the time of ...
So back in 2019 - Reverb.com coordinated Black Friday Limited Blacked Out Editions across 17 Brands and 19 Pedals - and by and large it was a resounding success - a lot of those sold out very quickly - and overall pretty much every special pedal maid was sold in fairly short order.
I always thought it a little surprising that this exercise wasn’t repeated more often as I kind of expected it to be an annual or biennial thing following on from the 2019 event. While we’ve had to wait 4 years ...
Beetronics has turned out another modern classic - this time kind of leaning into a Tweed style voicing - which produces superb Overdrive and Fuzz tones via a central mode toggle-switch. I’m a touch surprised that they’ve ditched the former double-click smart mode-flip function of the footswitch - which worked so well for the Vezzpa and Octahive V2 - and are now instead relying on an old-school manual switch - a step back really for me, but cost-saving I guess.
Price for the Standard ...
July was punctuated by two very significant events - Doug Tolley’s Witney Pedal Party on July 1st, and Phil Steere’s Brighton Guitar Show and FX Expo on July 15th - where I covered both of those in fine detail. Both were seminal events for different reasons, and while we were relatively few at Witney - we got to witness a truly legendary performance by David Rainger - which doubled up as about the best pedal demo I’ve yet / ever experienced - David was truly on fire - and the audience - we ...
Readers will know that I campaigned a long time for the standard version of the Octahive to have a foot-switchable octave mode - where that function was activated by default from a toggle switch on the side of the pedal. I actually own a really cool version of the V1 Octahive - pictured bottom right on the below visual - the mint-green one.
I think it was just a few months after I acquired my custom version, possibly as much as half a year later - when Beetronics started offering a second ...
This episode is a little more esoteric and preferential than most - and involves identifying the most notable and easily recognisable ’Pedal Shapes and Formats’ essentially. Of course there is some subjective preference here - while I will try to explain objectively how I came to this exact 25 pedal selection - some of these are very obvious - others are slightly more idiosyncratic choices - while there are obviously some brands that are particularly good at coming up with memorable enclosure ...