So scanning through this month it seems to have been mostly about Guitar / Pedal Shows, Japanese Pedals, and Pedals Delayed and Missing in the Post!

The Guitar Shows have been pretty fast and furious for March - with two of the most significant ones of the year, along with a fledgling grassroots one : The Guitar Show (Cranmore Park - Birmingham / Shirley), London Synth & Pedal Expo (Studio 9294, Hackney Wick, London), The Alternative Guitar Show (The Fighting Cocks, Kingston).

I of ...

I’m so excited to get my hands on this new Pedal Drop pedal. Readers will long have read on this blog that I was desperate to get my hand on an original 14-Leg Opamp-loaded OD-1 style overdrive, but with some additional tone-shaping mods also.

And that is exactly what Vitalli has done here. He’s been able to source NOS Motorola MC3403 14-Leg Opamp chips which are the exact equivalent specs of the original 14-Leg Raytheon Opamps - which have the same core designation number - while rather ...

February can often seem a rather odd month after the hustle and bustle of NAMM Show January - where a lot of new stuff always gets announced - while increasingly outside the NAMM schedule - but certainly in and around it! Projects delayed from the previous year often get released in January, but this year those kind of seem to be more spaced out - with some not feted to happen until March / April. February always seems slow compared to January, and that sometimes extends into March too before ...

I had the v1.3 version of The Forest Song for over a year. That was already a fantastic candidate, while I had some issues with the Ge clipping mode back then - which suffered a little too much volume drop for my liking, and wasn’t quite as effusively harmonic as I know Germanium can deliver.

So Vitalii went back to the drawing board twice. Largely working on the ’Ge Clipping Challenge’ but also tweaking and refining the calibration of the other controls, voltage regulation etc. Readers ...

I’m delighted that following my recent monthly pedal-chain update - saying that I could do with more Tremolos in my reference collection - we now have the first Drunk Beaver Tremolo as its 18th Pedal Drop!

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As Vitalii notes - this is an LDR + LED Optical style Tremolo with Digital controls and 6 different wave-shapes onboard - Triangle, Ramp Up, Ramp Down, Square, Sine, and Square Pattern [1-1-0-0-1-0-1-0].

Controls - Output, Intensity (Depth), Rate, Wave Shape : 1-6.

The digital ...

I’m a little late with this as I had to wait for mine to arrive - and all of batch 1 was sold out before mine landed! So the plan was for this article to go live when batch 2 was ready - and you should grab one while you can - these will go really fast - they’re priced to be snapped up very quickly ($150).

The Hoverla is a little similar to the 10th Pedal Drop Sumy - which was Germanium also, while the Hoverla has a different Pickup Simulator Transformer (with hotter 2.5H inductance), and ...

I’m delighted to report that my friend and yours Vitalii Bobrov - of Drunk Beaver fame - at last has a proper website / webstore for his pedals - DRUNK-BEAVER.ROCKS - where his full current range of 19 pedals can be purchased - of course when in stock.

All these pedals are made in relatively small batches (20 or so at a time) and when there is high demand as there often is - then stock clears out very quickly and then there is typically a wait of around 3-4 weeks before more stock is ready ...

So 2024 is off to a pretty spirted start! I treaded myself to 2 pedals right at the tail end of the year - the Poly VERBS puts in an appearance in this month’s selection - while the Reeves Electro BHS-D is running a touch late and will be part of the February selection instead.

This time of the year has to be mostly about NAMM - while I feel that a lot of builders kind of took away from NAMM and launched / showcased their new release in advance!

I’ve still to make it to NAMM - timing’s ...

Rivne Compressor (fun naming - as the Rivne city name could be translated as ’Flat’). It’s Vitalii’s take on classic Dyna Comp / Ross Compressor circuits with some necessary mods : clean signal blend, better high impedance input buffer, must-have attack switch (classic / shorter / longer), and a tone control to get back the highs usually lost due to compression itself.

A few interesting design choices here. After much research Vitalii found that Japanese versions of that classic circuit (...