In many ways this is the most straightforward category with singular award nominees - GOLD, SILVER and BRONZE.

It’s the second smallest category after Distortions - and the one where I own the least number of pedals in proportion to the whole - just 10 out of these 26.

The order pretty much set itself - with the Cornerstone Nucleo being the clear winner from the start. I’m so impressed with every aspect of that pedal - it’s a perfect Trifecta of Design, Feaures and Playability - pretty ...

What we have here is a killer Trifecta of potent shoegazer-enhanced compact editions - where two of them are fully Stereo capable.

Conventional wisdom would decree the order of : Treble Overload > Moonbeam Phaser > Dream Station.

While for shoegazer optimisation you need to reverse the order and put the reverb at the front of the chain - as several demoers have done below. I quite like Ian Pritchard’s setup too - with the Dream Station in the middle, and Thee Treble Overlaod in front! ...

DBA has rolled out a really cool stretched out, endless, and cavernous stereo reverberator here - making use of TRS ports, and with 3 increasingly intense Modes onboard.

It’s a fairly simple pedal in many ways - but super smart too with its dual footswitches, and Low Pass Filter. It’s perfect for those who want to deliver a ’Big’ reverb sound in Stereo - in the most straightforward of manners. And the Modes and 2nd Footswitch throw in some useful variations.

External Controls - Dry>Wet Mix...

This is the only brand that could dream of mashing up a crossover frequency filter with a savage Fuzz circuit. You should be familiar with the concept of a Crossover Circuit - as I covered my good friend David’s Great Eastern FX XO Variable Crossover Splitter + Blender not so long ago.

The big difference here is the addition of Resonance control - which makes the output more textured and gnarly, and you then split the frequency into dual Fuzz Channels which further clip and shape those ...

Levitation is an Austin, Texas based Music and Arts Platform - known for its live events and festivals. This is their first pedal collaboration as far as I’m aware - and it’s limited to just 333 units which are only available from the Levitation.fm website - where said pedal goes for $225.

Controls - Gain, Reverb Blend, Reverb Time, Trem, Warp Range (Light Sensitivity), Light Sensor.

Everything about this pedal is fairly self-explanatory, and intuitive and familiar - apart from the Warp...

Intriguing reboot here as the Limited Edition Pedal Movie Collaboration Pedal gets an extended lease of life. You may recognise the format of this pedal by now - which follows the same path as EQD’s Aurelius Chorus, Ledges Reverb, and Spatial Delivery V3 Filter pedals. All these have 4 knobs - including a 6-Position Presets Rotary, a 3-way Mode Switch, a Presets Save/Recall button and an Expression port.

This means that the Time Shadows Subharmonic Multi-Delay Resonator gains 6 Presets, ...

I believe the first version of this was initially launched back in 2009 or thereabouts - 3 control knobs and a single footswitch. This new V2 Edition of Octave Clang has an additional ’Octave’ Footswitch - so that you can play with or without the ring modulation style Octave effect.

"The OCTAVE CLANG V2 is a pseudo-ring/distortion/noise/octave pedal that creates its unique sound from a specially sourced transformer and precision-matched diodes. This generates extremely rich harmonics and ...

The Modutility roundup combines Modulation, Utility and Pitch type pedals - it also includes Multi-FX and Multi-Modulation pedals of course. Some years this selection is relatively sparse - while this year it’s totally chock-a-block! In fact it was a struggle to whittle the Longlist down - and inevitably some pedals I wanted to feature did not make the cut - including the Endorphin.es Ghost Pedal Multi-FX and Subdecay Prometheus 3 Dual Super Filter.

I still feel that this selection of 26 is...

So back in 2019 - Reverb.com coordinated Black Friday Limited Blacked Out Editions across 17 Brands and 19 Pedals - and by and large it was a resounding success - a lot of those sold out very quickly - and overall pretty much every special pedal maid was sold in fairly short order.

I always thought it a little surprising that this exercise wasn’t repeated more often as I kind of expected it to be an annual or biennial thing following on from the 2019 event. While we’ve had to wait 4 years ...