GPX Blog

I have covered off a number of my favourite Summer NAMM pedals already - including the Boss 200 range, RC-10R and SY-1, the Fulltone OCD Ge, the REVV G2, the Spaceman Effects Gemini IV, and Walrus Audio Kangra for instance. And there’s a couple more surprise ones I will be posting as dedicated features very soon - so stay alert for those! In the wake of one of the best ever Winter NAMM’s it was clear that the Summer NAMM could never match that degree of innovation - in fact most of ...

Readers of this blog will already know how much a fan I am of BYOC’s Crown Jewel Multidrive pedal - with its multitude of dials and switches - 4 gain stages in effect and clean blend circuit. I’ve said that this is not only likely the most versatile drive pedal out there currently, but also an essential educational tool for understating how different degrees of voltage, clipping, tone-shaping and Q-control impact on the output signal.

I wasn’t really that much ...

This article was sparked by a number of different recent occurrences - I’m obviously a big fuzz fan and consider these sorts of things all the time - with no less than 135 fuzz pedals now in my Fuzz collection or Fuzz Tone Library as I like to call it. In a series of conversations with Sof Tebboune of Expresso FX, the subject came up as to why I happened to have one or several fuzz pedals from one builder while none from another builder of equal if not greater presumed stature/renown.

&...

Australia and New Zealand together have a fair few brands of international repute, and I for one certainly have a number of pedals of Australian origin in my collection. Foremost amongst those is Michael Ibrahim’s eponymous MI Audio / MI Effects - from which range past and present - I have 7 to date - with a couple more on the ’nice-to-have’ wishlist. Of the ones I have 2 are permanent features in my pedal-chain - the Super Crunch Box V2 (my Brown Sound pedal of choice) and ...

This is the 11th in the Pedal Builders Country Series as such, although I’ve had to cast the net slightly wider as I currently don’t consider there to be enough top-tier / International-level builders in a single country here to satisfy the usual criteria. Brazil and Argentina come fairly close - with Brazil having significantly the most concentrated volume of builders of any Country in that part of the world. Generally Brazil, Argentina and Chile are particularly well represented. ...

This is one of those moments that I feel that my celebrated Pedal-Chain has reached another milestone of ’peak performance’. There are a number of new releases here - and probably all the big ones I was expecting this year - bar the Chase Bliss Audio / Benson Amps Automatone MKII PreAmp - which is due in the Autumn now - and still pending final pricing, but will probably take up the top spot on Slot #14 eventually. Also - my long-awaited Beetronics Swarm Harmonizing PLL Style Fuzz ...

I had encountered Demon Pedals several times in passing - I have certainly been aware of them for a number of years now but am still not sure where I first clocked them, yet they were one of the first brands that came to mind when I did my ’German Pedal Builders’ feature - while back then I had not wholly been won over - I needed some additional spark to get fully onboard. Turns out that spark was their newest pedal - the Kondo Shifuku D-Style Overdrive - which captivated me on ...

Poland was both trickier and yet eventually easier to rationalise than originally perceived. I have scanned through many a country now, and Poland seems to be the last of those with sufficient numbers of high calibre pedal builders to warrant a dedicated feature*. As noted before - these sorts of article take quite a lot of work to complete - and so this is the last of these I will be doing for a while.

* Note that USA and Japan are the leading pedal builders of the world still and too...

Denmark is a country which is known for punching above its weight - particularly in the field of exports - with a number of globally renown brands in several categories - including Bang and Olufsen, Ecco shoes, Georg Jensen jewellery, LEGO, The Republic of Fritz Hansen furniture (Arne Jacobsen etc.) and Stelton homewares. So it’s no surprise really that so many of its pedal brands are well-known too - particularly of course TC Electronic - which is one of the overall Big 4 along with Boss...

This article continues the series which I started with Best of British, Canadian, French, German and Italian Pedal Builders - some of which could do with updating probably, but frankly I prefer doing new stuff. It turns out that Greece is actually a significant hub of activity with a number of Internationally renown brands.

I feel the big 3 are Crazy Tube Circuits, JAM Pedals and Tsakalis Audioworks, while VS Audio also has had some significant publicity fairly recently and ...