GPX Blog

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 ...

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 ...

Australia and New Zealand together have a fair few brands of international repute, and I for one certainly have a number of pedals of Australian origin in my collection. Foremost amongst those is Michael Ibrahim’s eponymous MI Audio / MI Effects - from which range past and present - I have 7 to date - with a couple more on the ’nice-to-have’ wishlist. Of the ones I have 2 are permanent features in my pedal-chain - the Super Crunch Box V2 (my Brown Sound pedal of choice) and ...

This is the 11th in the Pedal Builders Country Series as such, although I’ve had to cast the net slightly wider as I currently don’t consider there to be enough top-tier / International-level builders in a single country here to satisfy the usual criteria. Brazil and Argentina come fairly close - with Brazil having significantly the most concentrated volume of builders of any Country in that part of the world. Generally Brazil, Argentina and Chile are particularly well represented. ...

This is one of those moments that I feel that my celebrated Pedal-Chain has reached another milestone of ’peak performance’. There are a number of new releases here - and probably all the big ones I was expecting this year - bar the Chase Bliss Audio / Benson Amps Automatone MKII PreAmp - which is due in the Autumn now - and still pending final pricing, but will probably take up the top spot on Slot #14 eventually. Also - my long-awaited Beetronics Swarm Harmonizing PLL Style Fuzz ...

This article was largely triggered by the recently released Slö Multi Texture Reverb which of course I love and which has gone straight onto my wishlist despite its mono output. I see it as a solid competitor to the rather pricier and more complex Chase Bliss Audio Dark World and a perfect tool for ambient textures. I personally would use it as a textural tool in my ’glitch pedal’ slot as my main time-based effects are stereo.

I’ve featured Walrus Audio a fair ...

When I do my category roundups and reviews, my remits are always to be as broad as possible within the set criteria, and I typically include one or two older and discontinued models alongside the usual suspects and new releases. It is always with some degree of sadness that I witness pedal builders going out of business for one reason or another. This industry seems to have a fairly high burnout rate and with competition getting ever fiercer, it is unfortunately understandable that some ...

I had encountered Demon Pedals several times in passing - I have certainly been aware of them for a number of years now but am still not sure where I first clocked them, yet they were one of the first brands that came to mind when I did my ’German Pedal Builders’ feature - while back then I had not wholly been won over - I needed some additional spark to get fully onboard. Turns out that spark was their newest pedal - the Kondo Shifuku D-Style Overdrive - which captivated me on ...

I already singled out the Newly Revamped Matthews Effects Range in my piece on Pedal Graphic Design - but there I focused more on the design of the actual pedals - principally the facia graphics and control topology - knob choice etc. However there was much more to the Matthews Effects Range Revamp than just a pedal design change - and some of the most significant improvements happened within the disciplines of Packaging and supplementary Collateral. ...

Poland was both trickier and yet eventually easier to rationalise than originally perceived. I have scanned through many a country now, and Poland seems to be the last of those with sufficient numbers of high calibre pedal builders to warrant a dedicated feature*. As noted before - these sorts of article take quite a lot of work to complete - and so this is the last of these I will be doing for a while.

* Note that USA and Japan are the leading pedal builders of the world still and too...