For Alex to miniaturise his formerly BB-enclosure pedals, the Multi-Clipping Element was always going to be the trickiest part to incorporate - because of the dimensions of said rotary pot, and all the Diode Component Pairs which made up each Clipping option.

In the process of miniaturisation the enclosures have seen a significant change in aesthetics - with more of an outline print artwork onto a raw enclosure - and accentuated by those beautiful / vibrant and colour-coded CBA-style ...

I covered the Ibanez Mini Pedal Range back in August - when there were 8 in total. Ibanez has since decided to round out its lineup with a 2-Band EQ tone-sculpting Boost, and a 4/6 Stage switching Phaser - which provides decent competition for MXR’s ever successful Phase 95.

Both pedals have enough variety and versatility about them to be amongst the strongest contenders in their respective categories. It’s been a while since I did my classic Mini Boost roundup of 16 highly...

This is obviously a follow-up from the Josh Scott / JHS January 1st YouTube video as below. Where Josh carried out and exercise where he compiled the best pedals released over the last two decades - in 6 specific categories - Best Overdrive / Distortion, Best Fuzz, Best Time-Based Effect, Best Modulation, Best Compressor, and Best Weird / Other - all must have been release January 1st 2000 or later.

Along with his own take, he solicited opinions from Jamie Stillman of EQD, Matthew ...

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 ...

And so here is the culmination of everything that happened to the pedal-chain in 2020.

There were quite a few more displacements than I had expected - all told 22 slots changed over this year - including 19 Brand New Pedals for 2020, then 3 slightly older pedals, and some incidentals.

The most significant shift, and the one that caused the most disruption was the arrival of Boss GT-1000 CORE in October. This is often the case when you bring in a big new pedal - and you need to...

So I’ve now completed 5 preliminary shortlists type articles featuring between 9 and 30 or so of the best pedals released in 2020 - in each of the following categories :

• Best New Reverb Workstation Pedals (9)
• Best New Overdrive and Distortion Pedals (29)
• Best New Fuzz Pedals (31)
• Best New Delay and Reverb Pedals (20)
• Best New Modulation, Pitch, and Utility Pedals (28)

I sincerely apologise if I’ve overlooked any here, while I’m not sure they would have necessarily ...

And here is the first of the category overviews for the year - combining those Overdrive and Distortion pedals which sparked some interest for me. Note that there will be 4 of these types of articles - Overdrive & Distortion (this one), Fuzz, Delay and Reverb (exc. Reverb Workstation already covered), and Modulation + Pitch + Untility pedals. Before I then reveal my overall 25 or so favourite favourite pedals for the year in a Best-of-the-Best listing - with possibly some sneaky additions. ...

I’m a big dan of Stone Deaf FX pedals generally - while I really tend to favour their more compact enclosure editions - per the Tremotron and Syncopy pedals. So I was delighted to see that the QBoost is another compact variety of that ilk.

This is about as simple a pedal as there is - with just two knobs, and two footswitches. The left-knob and footswitch relate to the full-frequency Pre-Amp Boost / Push, while the high-hand knob and footswitch are for a frequency-focused Freq ...

Readers will know that I’ve been trying to chase down this pedal for around 2-3 years - in my opinion the best / most practical and most adjustable 2-Channel Dumble-Style Preamp made to date. There are actually 3 different models of this Ethos Preamp that Custom Tones makes - the original large-scale full-format Ethos 2-Channel Overdrive + Boost, the BB-sized Ethos Clean II Single Channel Preamp, and the BB-sized Ethos Clean-Fusion II 2-Channel Preamp. All are made to order by Mr Custom ...

Reverb.com has revealed the best-selling pedals of 2020 on that particular platform. And while there are plenty of other big retailers on the Interweb - Reverb is likely the largest single entity - so some heed should be paid to these stats, while they don’t necessarily give you the full global picture. Plenty of manufacturers sell direct - and you have all those major stores - with Andertons, Sweetwater and Thomann leading the charge - which play into things too. Nevertheless it always ...