GPX Blog

I’ve already largely decided what new pedals I will be targeting this year (that I know of!) - following on from the various reveals and announcements made over the last week, and other projects I’m aware of and various themes I will be pursuing in 2020.

First of all to explain the above visual - this features and extrapolation of my current pedal-chain - with the NAMM legend in front of various new / newish pedals - Green means already acquired - or at least already ...

So despite the perilous state of the world, the first NAMM of the new decade actually turned out to be pretty stellar. I had thought that last year’s exceptional show might end up as the all-time high water mark - but this one turned out just as many pleasant surprises.

Slightly different to last year there were a more significant number of pedals announced and launched in advance of the show - while a lot of pedals at the show had very little by way of collateral and some are ...

The Visitor is the more interesting of the pair obviously as a brand new endeavour - while the Fault 2 seems on first glance mostly just to have cosmetic difference - but there is a lot more to it - as we shall see!

The Visitor essentially has two different Modulation Channels - the Primary with Tremolo, Chorus and Phaser options while the Secondary just has Tremolo and Chorus. For the Primary you get Rate and Depth Controls - while the Secondary only has a single knob which interacts ...

I have long been a fan of Alexander’s slightly quirky NEO Series of pedals - with 4 onboard presets, up to 6 modes and secondary / alt functions on every knob - all in handy dual-footswitch compact enclosures. To-date I have only acquired overdrives and the La Calavera Phaser - but there are many more Alexander Pedals on my wishlist and likely at least a couple more candidates here.

The big release is the Superball Kinetic Modulator - a sort of modulated delay - which for one of ...

Each year I like to do a comparison of where my current thinking is ahead of the Winter NAMM Show versus shortly after I have witnessed all the new innovations for the year and I have finalised my annual target list. The Chain already features several pedals that will be properly featured at NAMM for the first time - and I’m still waiting for Pete Thorne’s demo video of the Sinvertek N5+ Drive so I can publish my findings on that excellent pedal.

My most recent new arrival ...

Panos Sotiropoulos recently reached out to me to remind me of Vs Audio’s 3 really cool new pedals - which are exactly the sort of thing GPX / I typically gravitate towards. These could have been handy to feature before or in my recent ’6 Key Guitar Pedal Trends’ feature, but they arrive equally serendipitously to support several of the key arguments put forward in that article.

On the surface we have two analog bucket-brigade-device based pedals with digital control ...

Each year - based on the previous year’s experience, I focus on the most pertinent and relevant trends happening in guitar pedal design and manufacturing. I long since highlighted the dual-footswitches trend which was really popularised by Chase Bliss Audio - and continues to proliferate with brands such as Jackson Audio, JHS and Walrus Audio.

The first time I did this type of feature I highlighted the evolution of larger more populous pedalboards with more pedals in the chain, ...

I’ve long mentioned that we’re living through the second golden age of effects pedals (some say ’Diamond Age’’), and as good as things have been - 2019 took it all to an entirely new level of excellence. I don’t recall any previous year where we’ve had quite the same degree of innovation and so many ingeniously appealing pedals - this year has been so fast and furious - it’s been difficult to keep up at times.

I noted in my End of Year ...

It seems like Crazy Tube Circuits have saved the best to last this year with a pretty special rendition of the 1962 Magnatone Custom 460 Vibrato amplifier. In essence pairing a dynamic JFET gain stage with a dual phase shift modulation - which really captures and takes you into those sort of vintage harmonic tremolo / whirling phaser / vibe sounds.

You get 8 controls on the pedal:
Volume (Gain) | Master Output | Depth | B/N/M Bright/Normal/Mellow | Wet/Dry-Wet | Bass | Treble | Speed

&...

I’m possibly writing this just a touch prematurely as at the point of writing - one of the pictured pedals hasn’t turned up quite yet, and it will be touch and go if gets released out of customs before the end of the year. That pedal being Sinvertek’s new N5+ Drive - featuring no less than 7 beautifully milled aluminium knobs along with 5 toggle-switches - and all within a compact enclosure format - but more of that later.

This year has mostly sort of gone to plan - ...