GPX Blog

I had hoped to do regular monthly updates on how the various NAMM-announced pedal releases and other newer additions were impacting my own pedal-chain choices. Yet we all know how this year has gone - obviously impacted by numerous delays brought on by the Social Distancing required to counter the spread of Coronavirus / Covid-19.

Because of parts supply and resourcing issues, most 2020 NAMM pedals have been delayed to some degree. When there is uncertainty as to when the next ...

This adventure started back on January 8th when I received an email from Mr VS Audio himself - one Panos Sotiropoulos - informing me that he would be attending NAMM to showcase his 3 latest pedals - the Alchemy Analog Chorus, Project Diana Analog Delay and Aftermath Dynamic Distortion + Boost. Most of us are now used to the humorous and charismatic Vangelis Kritharis leading the demos - and he is most definitely the public face of VS Audio at most of the guitar shows and collaborates closely ...

Usually I limit these roundups to the 9 best from each brand - but I felt that the visual for that was a little gappy because of the different enclosure sizes! So in an effort to balance out the visual better I upped the limit to 11 - which allowed my to do a couple more interesting things with the listing.

These listings are based on a mix of my own personal favourites and more widely considered best pedal ambassadors for those ranges. For a lot of selections here there was an either ...

My first introduction to Lichtlaerm Audio was courtesy of Henning Pauly - where I caught him talking about Daniel Ringl’s Berlin-made pedals way before Henning’s demo videos were released. There’s actually 4 pedals to the range - including an input-triggered Noise Gate called The Key and The Gate - working somewhat similarly to Fortin’s Zuul, but relying on a loop rather than single input trigger. I’m very well covered in the area of Noise Gates so that is not my ...

We’ve been waiting for the full reveal on this one for a while as the first teaser image for this was Insta’d on the 14th of September last year. There were some expectations that this might feature at Winter NAMM, but it seems it’s only now fully formed.

What we have here then is all of TC Electronic’s TonePrint-enabled pedals in a single unit and available across 5 any way configurable slots. This means you get all the different variations of effects from the ...

When Keeley released its XVIII Anniversary Space Panorama Triptych I stated at the time that the artwork was somewhat more reminiscent of Walrus Audio - and surely they (Walrus) should be doing some sort of space-themed panorama across a number of pedals, as several of their pedals already carry that kind of sci-fi theme. I don’t know how related these two events are - but it sounds like someone was listening somewhere along the way and Walrus now has its own ’Luna’ Lunar ...

Of all the pedal brands I collect - I seem to have ended up with significantly more Boss than anything else - with currently 27 Boss Pedals all told. And while it’s not always the case that Boss has the most pedals represented in my active pedal-chain - it just so happens that right now my active Boss pedals number 7 - as follows per pedal-chain order:

• SY-1 Synthesizer
• BD-2 Blues Driver Keeley Freak Fuzz + Phat Mod
• OD-200 Hybrid Overdrive
• NS-2 Noise Suppressor Alchemy Audio Modded

This article was of course inspired by Josh ’JHS’ Scott’s recent YouTube video on his own favourite TC Electronic pedals (see Honorable Mentions below). We are funnily enough largely in agreement on the core selection - but we harbour somewhat different opinions on some of the marginals.

I’ve tried to view these as being category leading first-choice pedals - at least at the time of their introduction / key active period. Meaning that the TC Electronic option ...

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 ...