GPX Blog

Contrary to my original analysis - all 3 pedals are actually pretty well rounded and ready to go - while Jackson Audio want to give each a chance to reach their intended audience - meaning a staggered release - with the first to be made available being Joey Landreth’s signature Golden Boy Overdrive ($299) - pre-orders will be up any day soon with shipping due to start in February. The pedal gets its name from a statue which sits atop the Manitoba Legislative Building in Joey’s home ...

I’ve long mentioned that we’re living through the second golden age of effects pedals (some say ’Diamond Age’’), and as good as things have been - 2019 took it all to an entirely new level of excellence. I don’t recall any previous year where we’ve had quite the same degree of innovation and so many ingeniously appealing pedals - this year has been so fast and furious - it’s been difficult to keep up at times.

I noted in my End of Year ...

I’m possibly writing this just a touch prematurely as at the point of writing - one of the pictured pedals hasn’t turned up quite yet, and it will be touch and go if gets released out of customs before the end of the year. That pedal being Sinvertek’s new N5+ Drive - featuring no less than 7 beautifully milled aluminium knobs along with 5 toggle-switches - and all within a compact enclosure format - but more of that later.

This year has mostly sort of gone to plan - ...

For many players the BC183/2L loaded Chase Tone ’68 Red Velvet Fuzz was/is the perfect warm 60’s ’Germanium’ style voicing Fuzz Face type of Fuzz - with all the flavour and none of the downsides of Germanium! It kind of follows through from the lineage of the former Roadster Fuzz - which I also have - as well as the also discontinued Blue Stardust Fuzz.

The control topology of the Fuzz Fella is that same 5-knob layout that we’re familiar with from the Red ...

My own story with Sitek pedals can be traced back to a fortuitous YouTube demo by Joss Allen (April this year) of the then pretty brand spanking new Pandora Fuzz. Everyone knows I’m a huge fuzz fan by now - and I really liked what I heard and what I saw - pretty much within the first couple of minutes of playback - I was straight onto Reverb.com where Sitek has a store - and the pedal was with me within a matter of days. The Pandora being Andrzej ’Andy’ Sitek’s evolved ...

When I started this roundup a few years ago, there were only 9 pedals in my selection, while this latest edition has 28 - which will likely be the maximum number I display here - I will just ongoingly swap in newer and more interesting pedals as and when I come across them - for future roundups.

I’ve long since singled out Fuzz Pedals as being particularly suitable for the mini format - and in fact my first long-term pedal-chain fuzz was the still excellent EWS Little Fuzzy Drive...

Near the start of this week we saw several leading pedal builder brands go all mysterious on us posting an encircled (B) logo ident accompanied by the hashtag #BLACKEDXOUT on various social media. Many thought this to mean some sort of limited or black edition pedals for the Black Friday ’sales’, while I wrongly guessed it implied a Black Friday Sales boycott.

This afternoon all was revealed when 17 Brands together released all-black stealth-like enclosures for one or a few...

I’ve featured MXR quite a lot on this site over the years, but bizarrely and somewhat inexplicably to date have only acquired one of those numerous pedals - the Mini Phase 95, actually with the Brown Acid it makes 2! And this just after my fairly recent acquisition of the Pigdog Juju Fuzz - which also happens to be a TB MKIII style fuzz - I think I now have a nicely rounded quartet of MKIII’s with room for a couple more no doubt. Of course I’m an avowed fuzz fan, and I have ...

Yet another Pedal Primary Colour Wheel derived article - I must surely be running out of these colour-associated varieties soon. In my original piece I recalled the alliteration of Lovepedal’s Purple Plexi which made that the most obvious Purple Pedal association, yet I also mentioned how Jimi Hendrix had inspired a number of Purple Fuzz Pedals. This is as distinct from the Violet Ram’s Head Muff - which is associated with a slightly different hue. Here the colour Purple is that ...

I spent the whole of yesterday at the Islington UK Guitar Show - which turned out to be quite a different experiences for me compared to last year’s somewhat haphazard inaugural event at Olympia - this was much better organised, and I really enjoyed attending the many breakout events at the show.

For Pedal fans it was really quite a simple show with relatively few Pedal purveyors - and with one stand having most of the action - i.e. the Audio Distribution Group - with 16 brands -...