It seems quite timely that I just recently covered off the Caroline Parabola Pawnshop Tremolo - with its lush, warm-sounding higher gain preamp. Apparently the very same preamp that’s also in the Caroline Météore Lo-Fi Reverb. Caroline Guitar wisely decided to give this excellent preamp a solo outing!

So this new overdrive pedal further celebrates and honours Aaron Graves, who has long been associated with the brand. We get quite a beautifully warm and granular overdrive here with 2 x gain ...

I had kind of overlooked the Caroline Guitar Co. modulation pedals for a while, where the one that had always interested me the most was the Arigato Phaser - which took me a while to get to for whatever reason! I eventually landed that one near the start of this month!

I was so impressed with the Arigato - Phaser / Vibrato / Vibe that I decided that I should go for all 3 of the Caroline Modulation pedals - Arigato Phaser, Parabola Tremolo, and Somersault Lo-Fi Modulator.

One of my ...

I originally featured this pedal on the site back in January of 2023 - so it’s been on the cards for a while! I obviously need to juggle a lot of priorities all the time - and some pedals unfortunately fall through the cracks momentarily - while I mostly manage to recover them at a later stage!

This Arigato is my 4th Caroline pedal, and I love it so much that I’m very tempted to pick up Philippe’s other 2 modulations - the Parabola Tremolo, and Somersault Lo-Fi Modulator / Chorus. 

The ...

This project has been a long time in the making - I actually started off this compilation properly last autumn, and then have iterated the final selection a number of times since then - before reaching this final format. I apologise to anyone whom I’ve inadvertently left out - I still have a number of Octave Fuzzes to require - that task is never ending!

I own around 80 octave fuzzes so far - and this is near enough half of those - where I’ve mostly leant into compact editions - and ...

Caroline has significantly ramped up its Kilobyte Lo-Fi Delay with a much more expansive and granular 8 controls topology.

At its core this has a PT2399 chip with an official maximum factory delay time of 300ms. While that has been ’stretched’ and filtered to deliver the 500ms+ Lo-Fi delay variation. Caroline deliberately doesn’t provide max delay time - as it can vary enormously from just over 500ms to more than 800ms.

Controls - Level, Sharpness (Most Lo-Fi CCW), Preamp / Saturation, ...

So February, as expected, turned out to be quite the slow moving month - with not too many featured releases. You always get the big announcements at NAMM - and then it takes a few months typically for those pedals to filter through.

There were a few heavy hitters that emerged in February or sooner - including the Kernom Elipse Modulation Playground, and the Polyend Step Drum Machine Pedal - both of which went on the board this month.

I also made the Plutoneium Chi-Wah-Wah a permanent ...

So January 2025 sees a momentous milestone - where we have the peak possible number of pedals in the chain - which now numbers no less than 52 Pedals. It’s an incredibly tight squeeze - and all the available space is now fully used up.

I’ve re-flowed the main visual - where I used to try to have a fixed format arrangement - but now have re-numbered the slots entirely corresponding to the number and order of those pedals. Last January I noted that I was going to switch out my 2 Friedman ...

I had long since identified 3 Caroline Guitar Co pedals that I really wanted, but as is sometimes the case, I wanted special editions of each - and I was just waiting for the right ones to materialise!

I’ve already covered 2 pedals from that Trifecta - my white-knob CCCP edition of the Hawaiian Pizza Fuzz-Drive, and the recent Zero Edition of the Wave Cannon Superdistorter.

This article is really mostly about the third of my selection - where the Germanium edition of the Shigeharu ...

Here it’s the turn of the new distortion pedals this year. Where I own all but 7 here :

• Crazy Tube Circuits Heatseeker Enhanced Full Stack Marshall style Preamp
• God City Instruments Brutalist Distortion
• Krozz Devices RoyalBreaker Extended Rat style Distortion
• Noise Engineering Dystorpia Fuzz/Distortion
• Soldano Super Lead Overdrive Plus
• UAFX Anti 1992 High Gain Amp
• UAFX Knuckles ’92 Rev F Dual Rec Amplifier

So of this selection of 34 I own 27 :

Finalists

• Audiostorm Grand