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 :
So of this selection of 34 I own 27 :
Finalists
So this incredibly busy month was supposed to be all about Tremolos, culminating with the Rounder Sounds Zebra-Trem Review and 30 Tremolo Pedal Overview. But we hit some snags along the way - the Zebra-Trem was mysteriously held up in customs for a week, and then got slightly lost in the local postal network. And when it did finally arrive - evidently it had been dropped a few times, as the screen was no longer working. After trying various obvious remedies with Bill over a few days - with no ...
The Wave Cannon has long been on my wishlist, alongside Caroline’s Shigeharu Octave Fuzz. It seems the time is right for the Wave Cannon - now in its best ever iteration, and kind of returning more to its original 2010 roots versus the more divergent MKII edition.
Philippe Herndon launched the Caroline Guitar Company back in 2010, and the Wave Cannon was its very first product - a heavily modified and evolved ProCo Rat with more shaping and gain-range.
The nearest I had come to owning ...