GPX Blog

This post was sparked off by the recent launch of the Magnetic Effects Zig Zag Dual Stage Overdrive, my relatively recent acquisition of the Aleks K Production Maple Leaf Royal Drive and ThorpyFX Heavy Water Dual Boost pedals, and the hopefully fairly imminent arrival of my on-order Loophole Pedals Grey Matter Overdrive. They got me thinking about other pedals of this type which allow you to blend 2 separate circuits together essentially for more versatility and more complex and richer tones. ...

It has to be said that Carl Martin - a long-standing Danish pedal-builder of high pro-gear repute - was starting to look somewhat fusty and old-fashioned there for a while. And while some brands would look to simply refresh their graphics and update things in a largely superficial manner - Carl Martin set to designing an entirely new compact enclosure for its Vintage Series of pedals.

The incumbent pedals were in rather uninteresting medium enclosures while the degree of innovation 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 ...

In line with its ongoing enclosure format innovations and taking significant influence from the recent 500 series - Boss replaces the dual latching-plate format of its 20 Series Twin Pedal line with a much more compact and sleeker medium vertical enclosure 200 Series Design - with 4 pedals due to launch in September, and all priced at £219 as of the moment:

• DD-200 12 Mode Digital Delay Stereo Workstation - £219
• EQ-200 10 Band Dual Channel Stereo Graphic Equalizer - £219

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. ...

I consider it my civic duty to bring the public’s attention back to Brian Mena and his excellent Menatone Pedals - as they seem to have slipped a touch under the radar of late. Part of the problem is that Menatone has only 3 dealers - Truetone Music in the USA, Deluxe Guitars in Australia and LEP International in Japan. Of those, only Deluxe seems to maintain a decent inventory - and they refuse to ship abroad - which is no good for us Brits! There’s also just a fairly meagre ...

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 ...

When I did my Stackable Overdrive + Distortion Pedals feature at the start of the year my intentions were always to do a follow-up with Distortion + Distortion Pedals, and the recent release of the KSR Ceres makes it opportune to do this now. For my former article I could have included a few others in the overview - I just selected the 4 most similar, while for this new one I actually struggled to find even the 4 included within the same category. And of those 4 the Suhr Eclipse is kind of ...

I’ve only just very recently provided a list of my 20 favourite Marshall Style Pedals - and obviously some of those have been separated out into the heavier High Gain category - but when you focus on distortion you can’t really get away from Marshall to a large degree - such is its influence on these types of tones. In fact 14 pedals are retained from the Marshall article and 10 more somewhat different varieties have been added.

If you’ve recently read the Marshall ...