GPX Blog

I’ve already largely decided what new pedals I will be targeting this year (that I know of!) - following on from the various reveals and announcements made over the last week, and other projects I’m aware of and various themes I will be pursuing in 2020.

First of all to explain the above visual - this features and extrapolation of my current pedal-chain - with the NAMM legend in front of various new / newish pedals - Green means already acquired - or at least already ...

So despite the perilous state of the world, the first NAMM of the new decade actually turned out to be pretty stellar. I had thought that last year’s exceptional show might end up as the all-time high water mark - but this one turned out just as many pleasant surprises.

Slightly different to last year there were a more significant number of pedals announced and launched in advance of the show - while a lot of pedals at the show had very little by way of collateral and some are ...

I caught some early preview snaps of these on Instagram - and have been waiting for a while for better resources to appear yet to no avail. In the end I had to make my own composites from the best reference I could find online as it does not appear Jackson Audio will be releasing proper details during the show. I was able to do decent facsimiles of the Modular Fuzz and Golden Boy - and will do the El Guapo Distortion image/overview separately / additionally later - as and when better references...

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 - ...

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 ...

You may recall that I wasn’t overly enamoured with Spaceman’s previous release - the Saturn VI Harmonic Booster - which wasn’t quite as pedestrian as some readers thought I made it sound, but nevertheless did not inspire me into action.

It is quite a different story with this new-but-old Apollo VII Overdrive which has actually been extracted from the guts of the Voyager I Optical Analog Tremolo where it acted as the PreAmp or Gain Stage for that pedal. Much in a ...

This review has taken somewhat longer than I intended - partly because of the considerable scope of variations covered by this pedal, and partly because of my ongoing changing adapted approach to deploying the pedal. My first instincts always seems to lean towards a philosophy of replication and replacement - that is to say trying to figure out which of my preferred / favourite dirt pedals can this one competently stand in for and replace if need be. I have lots of favourite fuzz, drive and ...

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...

This is my 3rd re-write from scratch of this article - I keep coming across new details! This was initially inspired by the arrival of Mooer’s E7 series - first represented by the Tone Capture GTR, and now by the very recent 7-Mode/7-Presets E7 Synth pedal which continues that distinctive new enclosure format - which is in someways an evolution from Mooer’s Micro-PreAmps - with the same 5 mini knobs and push-button topology, but here accompanied by 7 Mode/Preset LEDs positioned down...