GPX Blog

My own story with Sitek pedals can be traced back to a fortuitous YouTube demo by Joss Allen (April this year) of the then pretty brand spanking new Pandora Fuzz. Everyone knows I’m a huge fuzz fan by now - and I really liked what I heard and what I saw - pretty much within the first couple of minutes of playback - I was straight onto Reverb.com where Sitek has a store - and the pedal was with me within a matter of days. The Pandora being Andrzej ’Andy’ Sitek’s evolved ...

You may recall that I wasn’t overly enamoured with Spaceman’s previous release - the Saturn VI Harmonic Booster - which wasn’t quite as pedestrian as some readers thought I made it sound, but nevertheless did not inspire me into action.

It is quite a different story with this new-but-old Apollo VII Overdrive which has actually been extracted from the guts of the Voyager I Optical Analog Tremolo where it acted as the PreAmp or Gain Stage for that pedal. Much in a ...

This review has taken somewhat longer than I intended - partly because of the considerable scope of variations covered by this pedal, and partly because of my ongoing changing adapted approach to deploying the pedal. My first instincts always seems to lean towards a philosophy of replication and replacement - that is to say trying to figure out which of my preferred / favourite dirt pedals can this one competently stand in for and replace if need be. I have lots of favourite fuzz, drive and ...

I’m occasionally chastised by readers for not featuring enough lower cost pedals on this site - which is a somewhat unfair criticism really as I try to be as value-minded as possible - and do genuinely love pedals at all levels - and am ever on the look out for a bargain or two for myself.

Most will already know Tone City as an even more affordable Mooer-style mostly mini pedal operation, while most are not aware that lead engineer / circuit-designer J. Wong used to be at Movall ...

In the wake of the slightly slower than expected take-up of the 19 limited edition Black Friday ’Blacked Out’ (#blackedxout) Pedals I recently featured, Neunaber has decided to buck the trend with White Out versions of its flagship trifecta of Immerse Reverberator, Inspire Tri-Chorus Plus and Neuron Gain Intelligence. These go on sale on Wednesday 27th in extremely limited numbers, while there is also a social media give-away lucky draw of one each of these if you jump through a ...

Near the start of this week we saw several leading pedal builder brands go all mysterious on us posting an encircled (B) logo ident accompanied by the hashtag #BLACKEDXOUT on various social media. Many thought this to mean some sort of limited or black edition pedals for the Black Friday ’sales’, while I wrongly guessed it implied a Black Friday Sales boycott.

This afternoon all was revealed when 17 Brands together released all-black stealth-like enclosures for one or a few...

Josh Scott’s newest pedal draws from the changes made to the Eurorack 500 Series variant of this essentially signal conditioner and EQ box - based on the classic studio channel-strip. The original pedal was inspired by the beautifully warm-sounding mid-1960’s analogue pro studio mixing consoles designed by Rupert Neve (80 Series). A key magic ingredient of those mixing desks were the Neve-designed audio output transformers which here are represented by the equally stellar Lundahl ...

Most of you should have seen by now my ’Yellow Means OverDrive’ (9) feature which covers off all of Boss’s Yellow OverDrives, and more recently I did a piece on ’Boss’s High Gain and Metal Distortion Pedals’ (9) - so this article covers all those remaining Boss Drive and Distortion Pedals (13) (past and present) which exist between those two extremes.

This article is written with a view towards the forthcoming OD-200 Hybrid Drive Workstation which in...

Readers of this blog will know that I’m a big fan of high gain / metal distortion, and have a fair few pedals in that category - in fact I have 4 permanent slots in my pedal-chain which are dedicated to high gain (#24-#27). The two medium-sized slots (#25,#26) have pretty much been permanently occupied by the Empress Heavy and MI Effects Megalith Delta for the longest time now (even though I have great rotation alternatives here too) - while there is quite a lot of rotation on my 2 other ...

Electro-Harmonix has introduced a Nano version of its Operation Overlord Overdrive which manages to preserve most of that larger pedal’s functionality / feature set while there obviously have to be some compromises and concessions - and we loose the Stereo component of the original, as well as the Boost Level control and second Boost footswitch. I’m not sure why EHX hasn’t gotten onboard with the dual-footswitch compact enclosure style which is really fairly common nowadays - ...