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 ...

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 ...

The following article is composed of an assortment of essentially unrelated Overdrives which have recently caught my eye - albeit a couple of these have been around for a while.

The only common element here is that each of these has a distinctive bite to its output and correspondingly interesting textural character.

3 of these are multi-stage clipping drives, where two have separate controls for 2 of their stages - namely the AJ Peat Screaming Flamingo and Balaguer Fission ...

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...

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...

The new version of the Plimsoul has been housed in the same new type of enclosure as the recent Queen Bee Fuzz which I have and love - including of course top mounted jacks and easier access to the insides. It also seems to have borrowed the 3-way Bass Boost from the Queen Bee - set in its centre.

While the main knobs are exactly the same - they are just differently sized and labelled. We used to have Level, Sustain, Hi-Cut and Stage 2 - but those exact controls correlate with Volume, ...

For Alex to miniaturise his formerly BB-enclosure pedals, the Multi-Clipping Element was always going to be the trickiest part to incorporate - because of the dimensions of said rotary pot, and all the Diode Component Pairs which made up each Clipping option.

In the process of miniaturisation the enclosures have seen a significant change in aesthetics - with more of an outline print artwork onto a raw enclosure - and accentuated by those beautiful / vibrant and colour-coded CBA-style ...

And so here is the culmination of everything that happened to the pedal-chain in 2020.

There were quite a few more displacements than I had expected - all told 22 slots changed over this year - including 19 Brand New Pedals for 2020, then 3 slightly older pedals, and some incidentals.

The most significant shift, and the one that caused the most disruption was the arrival of Boss GT-1000 CORE in October. This is often the case when you bring in a big new pedal - and you need to...