So the somewhat oddly named Portafilter Multi-Drive is one of those smart analog circuits with digital controls. Which empowers you with incredible versatility here - where we essentially have 6 x total overdrives, 2 x distortions, 2 x three band EQ’s. And you have 6  onboard Presets and 20 via MIDI to make it all work for you!

The 3-Band EQ consist of the fully variable Bass and Treble controls, and a 3-way Mid control - with Flat / Scoop / Boost options.

Controls - 2 x Bass, Treble, ...

So this is the big one - all the top performers from the year in one selection.

We’ve already covered :

• 35 Boost & Overdrive Pedal Finalists
• 34 Distortion Pedal Finalists
• 32 Fuzz Pedal Finalists
• 38 Modutility Pedal Finalists
• 25 Delay and Reverb Pedal Finalists

Total Overall Finalist Selection of 164 Pedals!

Distilled down to the final favourites selection, where I own 27 of them, and will try to secure the final missing ones next year :

• Coffee Shop Pedals London Fog Tape Delay -

I obviously just recently won me an AC Noises Ricorda Retro Series Reverb as a Chase Bliss Mystery Box Bonus Pedal - so the first iteration I had to make on this article was to update the standard Blue Ricorda image to the limited colourway edition that I was gifted by my Mystery Box. This selection is typically the one where I own the least proportion of pedals featured, in fact in this case it’s easier to list the few that I own here :

• AC Noices Ricorda Stereo Granular Reverb + Freeze /

Following on from his smart stereo Cortado Reverb, by friend Benno has conjured up a quite superb Tape Style Delay - packed with some exceptionally smart features.

You get 4 different styles of delay, including a handy Dual Tape, and the powerful Playback Direction toggle-switch allows you to engage the Delay in Reverse, Forward, or both together in parallel - which is a little reminiscent of the Chase Bliss Reverse Mode C.

In my visual I’ve incorporated the secondary settings / ...

And so to the final category - where competition is extremely fierce this year. No doubt some of your favourites will have missed the cut here - but hopefully this selection is fully representative of the best of the year. Obvious I lean more towards immersive stereo effects - mono doesn’t really do it for me so much - while there is a smattering of mono pedals in here too. Price, format, versatility and practicality - everything counts!

Of the 23 featured in the selection - I own around ...

There’s no shortage of great compact reverb pedals out there currently and where the recent Strymon Cloudburst is more of a secondary reverb / additional reverb pedal for me, the Cortado is rather a primary - with 4 really cool and useful modes :

• Spring
• Tremoloverb
• Hall
• Octave

Where the Octave mode is obviously similar to the shimmer of the Cloudburst. The Cloudburst is focused on getting the most out of a single algorithm - while with the Cortado you have 4 distinct sounding modes / ...

So for the end of year Fuzz selection the only pedal of note that came a little too late to be included in this roundup was the very recent Reeves Electro BlackHatSound Deluxe Wedge - of which only 15 units have been made so far. Markus has promised me I can get copper insides when the next batch comes around - so I can complete my set!

Other than that everything of note that I’m aware of is included here in this selection. Again I own most of these - while there are still some down on the ...

Boy have I had some delivery troubles this month! - with pedals taking an absolute age to materialise - being held up at various junctures - including a now protracted period in customs clearance. In fact one of these took 3 weeks no less to make it through UK customs, and then another week and a half to get to my local delivery office - which is just insane. Hitherto customs clearance has never been more than a handful of days - occasionally you get outliers of a week or two - but it’s ...

Readers should know by now that I’m a huge fan of Chase Bliss’s ’Analog Heart + Digital Brain’ approach - but we rarely get to see that in the fuzz domain. Benno from Coffee Shop Pedals, based in Saskatchewan Canada, has done exactly that - where he has married a digital brain to his core cool Analog Discrete Silicon Fuzz Circuit - whereby you can save all 5 knob positions to one of 3 Presets.

Controls - Bass, Mid, Treble, Volume, Fuzz, Preset Footswitch (Red > Green > Blue), Bypass ...