Reader Charles H requested that I do a roundup of Clean Blend Overdrives - which resulted in the following selection. Most Bass Overdrives have Clean-Blend by default - while all the ones I have selected here are more specifically Guitar Overdrives. I personally don’t find myself needing to use Clean Blend so much - but I can totally understand why so many players find this functionality useful or even essential. The Blend knob is variously labelled Blend, Clean, Dry and Mix. I’ve ...

I am generally a huge fan of Keith Vonderhulls’ BYOC Pedal Imprint - where his Crown Jewel Multi-Drive is one of my favourite pedals of all time. Build Your Own Clone is obviously mostly a DIY Pedal Kit brand - while all the BYOC’s I have acquired to date have been fully assembled by professionals like Alchemy Audio and GearGasStore.

Big Tone Music Brewery is very much Keith’s Pro sister-range to BYOC - with a series of premium edition pedals fully and carefully ...

I am a little late to the Animalizzer - which Ricardo ’Rikk’ Cabecas officially launched in May of last year. Readers will know I’m a big fan of extended-functionality and extended-range pedals in particular. And the Animalizzer is pretty much definitely the most shapable of all the different Muff types out there in the wild - certainly at this size of enclosure.

In fact so shapable is the Animalizzer that it can be used as a sort Boost, Overdrive and Distortion in ...

This article really speaks to my own personal preferences in pedal-acquisitions, and how I’m always somewhat more drawn towards extended-range - and typically enhanced and evolved editions over and above the stock originals.

In many cases those more versatile editions are even rarer than the classic vintage originals. Meaning I always try to secure those more difficult-to-find examples first. On this occasion I still intend to grab a LM741 opamp early grey or yellow variety ...

It was only natural that the Compact Format Preferred Versions feature should follow the Mini examples. Again largely inspired by the recent ’12 Degrees’ projects.

Once more I’ve had a change of mind on some of the candidates and the preferred examples are slightly different to those previous references. Obviously new pedals have arisen, and priorities and preferences can shift fairly regularly based on prevailing mood.

That said, most of these are long-term...

So Reverb.com has just announced which limited edition pedal collaborations go on sale today - Tuesday 23rd February - to further celebrate the imminent release of ’The Pedal Movie’. The first two pedals went on sale last November and sold out pretty instantaneously. 1000 of Chase Bliss Audio + Zvex collaboration Bliss Factory Fuzz, and 1000 of Death By Audio + EarthQuaker Devices collaboration Time Shadows Subharmonic Multi-Delay Resonator.

Both pedals were rather original...

This article is in part inspired by my features on ’Mini Pedals State of the Art’, and those various ’12 Degrees’ posts I did at the tail-end of last year. Moreover I have had quite a few readers recently asking me for my preferred recommended mini pedals on various pedal-chain slots.

I last did this sort of exercise 4 years ago - where TC Electronic was kind of the dominant player - covering 8 of those 20 recommendations, with Mooer fairly close with 6 entries...

DigiTech’s latter sister brand DOD has delivered a number of pedal greats over the years, and since its foundation in 1973 by David Oreste Di Francesco. A lot of people focus on the early editions / 200 Series - while I’ve taken a slightly broader overview here - with the one concession really being the original 250 Overdrive/Preamp. Elsewhere I’ve gone for pretty much the latest viable editions - including the Blue reissue of the 201 Phasor - which also had Grey and Yellow ...

I’ve been peripherally aware of Alessandro Barretta’s pedals for a while now, known as ’Ale’ to his friends! He builds these fantastic proper boutique pedals - one at a time - at his studio in Pisa, Italy. This is a passion project first and foremost, and as it’s all made-to-order, he typically does not ship more than a couple or so pedals each month.

He currently has 2 pedals in production - both are high gain really - and the ’Drive and Boost&rsquo...

As a strictly non Bass Guitar owner/player I rarely feature specifically Bass gear, and when I do - it is typically from Darkglass as I really admire what they do - in terms of their signal processing, aesthetics, and smart modern technology and interfaces.

I have not seen any guitar demos of this unit yet - I don’t believe any are official yet, while Darkglass say it’s great for Guitars too - but this was obviously developed very specifically for Nolly - for his own ...