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 article has been a long time coming - where I originally started this ahead of the Mini Edition - which went live on January 24th. I was waiting for a couple of new pedals to be released - while the article has been iterated around 20 times now with a number of recent additions.

And the pedal I was waiting to launch still hasn’t quite happened, while the builder has authorised me to tease it in advance of its official release. And if I were to do the same exercise tomorrow - no doubt ...

Most of you won’t have noticed that I was locked out of my Instagram recently - from circa Thursday afternoon to Monday morning  a week or two ago - you will note the date of some of the posts as to when that happened. Social media is so unreliable these days - Instagram last locked my out for a fortnight around 6-7 months ago - owing to some sort of 2-factor authentication glitch (SMS digits not being sent) - which apparently took them two weeks to solve. So never a dull moment at GPX HQ - in ...

Near everyone is probably bored to death by now of Klon Klones - most of us have at least one or two or a few in their collections - and surely that format has reach peak saturation by now. Yet every now and again something materialises to shake things up again in new and interesting ways - and this limited edition CKK SHXC is another incredible engineering milestone by Mr Wu -  which massively improves on an existing well-loved format.

I’m admittedly something of a Mr Wu fanboy - with his ...

So May started with my posting the last of the NAMM Show stragglers, followed by an initial eclectic mix of different pedal types - while gradually leaning into ’Andy Timmons’ Month. I’ve always thought Andy to be a wonderful human being and a particularly fine journeyman guitarist. While it’s only in fairly recent years that he’s become somewhat more elevated in my affections as one of my all-time favourite guitar heroes. You will note that he did not feature in my last article on personal ...

Fans of Mr Wu like myself - particularly for his N5 and Scream Honey Series - are well aware that he has an amazing ear for tone, and an engineering prowess to match that ambition.

His recent N5 MGAT-1 MIAB 19-Level Gain Machine is a total masterpiece - and was my favourite pedal of last year - probably my favourite ever distortion pedal. Here with his new SHXC Super Overdrive he reworks and evolves his Scream Honey framework - to match and improve on, and move beyond Bill Finnegan’s ...

So it’s that time of year again when I trawl through the releases over these past 12 months or so and endeavour to extract the pedal highlights of the year. This exercise is all about drawing a line in the sand and figuring out which pedals deserve to be on the notable side of the line.

Of course everything I publish on Guitar Pedal X is highly curated - those are my own particular preferences and choices, and those are the pedals that I like the look of. So everything that appears on ...

So I last did one of these back in 2020 - meaning that these ’Best of Overdrive’ run-downs seem to be a circa biennial affair. We’ve upped the numbers to 32 this year, while they represent barely a quarter of the overdrives I have in my reference collection - so there are obviously a lot of honourable mentions listed below - before the Final Thoughts section.

These types of exercises are incredibly tricky to strike the right balance of generally considered classic overdrive pedals and ...

After a slow start to the year, everything sort of came to a crescendo in March - where I took delivery of a pedal for each day of the month. Of course some of these were embargoed from earlier months - while that volume of pedals for testing and pedalboard accommodation can be a little relentless.

There were also a number of key launches this month which can stress me out a touch - I obviously want to do well for those brands I support and pinpoint launches are always a little messy as you...