The purpose of this article is two-fold really - to celebrate my favourite Spaceman Effects Pedals that I’ve acquired to date, and to detail the nature and quality of those earlier releases that I’m still missing / chasing.

Spaceman is quite a novel brand really in many ways and has perpetuated the whole Limited Edition Fever that the pedal world seems to be increasing infected with. Each Spaceman release used to reduce me to a bag of nerves - an almost sort of auction ...

Beyond its most recent Mini Pedals, Pigtronix is another brand which seems to be floating somewhat under the radar today in most regards. They have a number of innovative and classic pedals - some of which alas have been discontinued fairly recently, but all are very worthy contenders in their respective genres / categories.

They’e one of the brands that has increasingly focused on Mini Pedals of late - which include some incredibly innovative and state-of-the-art pedals for that...

Subdecay is a brand which I’ve featured a lot on this site. All these pedals listed here have appeared or been mentioned several times on this blog, and it’s a surprise really that I don’t own more of these. In fact I have just two to date - the Harmonic Antagonizer and the Vector Analog Preamp - the latter of which falls just outside this preferential list.

There are several here I’ve been on the cusp of acquiring when another rising priority essentially took ...

March seems to have been unusually busy on all sides really, particularly with the day-job’s annual keynote event. Generally this year has been off to quite a moderate start, but that seems to have accelerated somewhat during this month.

It’s been a mixture of January NAMM pedals materialising and spring-time special offers, all of which contributed to a somewhat bumper month - with a record-breaking for me 29 acquisitions, prior to that the record stood at 26, while that ...

So I’ve recently acquired the Flower Pedals Hosta Wah Filter and Spaceman Artemis Modulated Filter, and before the AWOL Pedals Flow materialised, I was about ready to call it for my preferred filter selection. Those 4 pedals - Dusk, Hosta, Micro-Tron III, and Artemis really have me covered for all bases. While I quite like the look of the AWOL Flow too as a more incidental backup - for when my pedal-chain is deployed somewhat differently and needs to be able to accommodate an additional ...

It’s not long since I featured an overview of AWOL’s Micro Pedal range - while now of course there is one more - in the guise of the Flow Envelope Filter.

The Flow’s single knob controls the Sensitivity and Range of the Filter. Crank it fully CW and you get that classic bright and funky auto-wah sound. Turn the knob fully CCW and you get a gentle but full, low-pass filter - which can turn an overdrive into a fuzz. In-between you get various sorts of vocoder style ...

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...

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...

Dune fans will undoubtedly appreciate this theme a little more than most. And in fact the Atreides is based on Electro-Harmonix’s now vintage 1980’s Mini Synthesizer.

What we have here is a perfect complementary amalgamation of different modulations with a hearty Fuzz and Sub-Octave element. There are 7 lit-up sliders for which in the above visual I have highlighted in red text how they group / break down.

Essentially we have Output Volume, then Sensitivity and ...

This is obviously a follow-up from the Josh Scott / JHS January 1st YouTube video as below. Where Josh carried out and exercise where he compiled the best pedals released over the last two decades - in 6 specific categories - Best Overdrive / Distortion, Best Fuzz, Best Time-Based Effect, Best Modulation, Best Compressor, and Best Weird / Other - all must have been release January 1st 2000 or later.

Along with his own take, he solicited opinions from Jamie Stillman of EQD, Matthew ...