The Dope Priest’s original inspiration is quite a twisted origin story which touches on Guild, Mosrite, and Big Muff Creator / Electro-Harmonix Founder Mike Matthews. Back in 1967 during the height of Hendrix Mania - Guild Founder Al Drunge thought he could capitalise on the Hendrix Fuzz craze by commissioning Mosrite to OEM and essentially re-label their Fuzzrite pedal as the Guild Foxey Lady Fuzz. So very similar to all those Sola Sound projects where they OEM’d essentially their ...

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 ...

Those more sharp-eyed among you will have noted that I’m currently engaged in exploring the Pettyjohn Electronics range - sort of one or two pedals at a time. And this would seem to be a good point within those proceedings to share some of my findings thus far.

As I’ve relayed elsewhere, I was initially highly confused by Stephen Pettyjohn’s output in that all the Foundry Series pedals were offered with a number of ’Upgrades’. Making it seem to me that the...

April has been another pretty formidable month - and at last I have the CopperSound Triplegraph in my hands - which presented some challenges in being accommodated within the rig. I’ve had to significantly adjust and rejig various elements and areas - including of course the format of the above reference visual.

This indicates the physical position of the Triplegraph at position #14 in terms of physical pedal placement - where it sits just before the CBA Automatone Preamp, while ...

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...

I’m proud to declare that I own each of Alex Millar’s recent 6 Compact Edition Guitar Pedals - including of course the trio that was released last week. In that same shipment I received a plain version of the Siclone Silicon Chaos Initiator Fuzz - to which I myself applied the labels. You may recall from my ’Maverick Inflection’ article that I noted that I had some OCD issues with the splodgy nature of the graphics - to which ends Alex offered to do me a plain version - ...

I’m delighted to participate in the launch of 3 more of Alex’s classic pedal transformations - where his formerly BB-enclosure editions have been shrunk down and enhanced. The aesthetic theme of single colour graphic with matching knobs is particularly strong for these 3 varieties.

I always said that I would be acquiring all of Alex’s compact editions and the addition of these 3 brings my Zander Circuitry collection to 6. Alex kindly sorted me out with a plain version...

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 ...

Readers of this blog will know that I’ve long wanted the Blackhawk Amplifiers Balrog V3 Distortion pedal - in fact I’ve kind of been chasing it for a couple of years. I loved it right from first encounter - but these proved rather elusive to me for a while until I managed to secure one via the Blackhawk store on Reverb.com.

I’ve featured this as both a Metal and Doom/Sludge Pedal, and its triple cascaded TL072 Opamps produce the most appealing brutal and thick ...

This post marks the milestone that all these are now in the reference collection - with the Animalizzer and Pharaoh Supreme the most recent to be added. There are still a few more out there that I have my eyes on, while this selection in and of itself is pretty much as good as it can be.

These are all Extended-Range Muff-Style Fuzz Pedals which have a very significant coverage via additional clipping, gain-structure and tone controls. Each of these covers a number of varieties, while ...