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...

After a couple of complex pedal reviews - it’s nice to get back to basics with another new fuzz confection. Like most of my favourite fuzzes - this EHX Ripped Speaker Fuzz features an external Bias knob - which controls the timbre and texture of those ripping fuzz sounds.

This goes everywhere from a sort of farty / brassy sounding fuzz, to a smooth gating voicing, and onto more jagged cut-up stuttery/sputtery sounds. It does the voltage starve / dying battery thing really well, ...

This article has been much requested - following on from my similar takes on the 7 Key Big Muff varieties and 9 Key Tone Bender varieties. I’ve sort of covered this a little bit before courtesy of my 6 Potent Fuzz Face Pairings feature and also my piece on Key Fuzz Transistors, while this offers a more comprehensive and expansive overview.

Everyone knows the story about how Ivor Arbiter of Sound City / Drum City fame sort of adapted the MKI.V Tone Bender format into a mic-stand-...

It is with a heavy heart I report that this will be the last Jackson Audio feature I include on this site. I had intended doing a full in-depth review of the unit and all 6 Plugin Modules. And in pursuit of such I tried to request some degree of accommodation / discount to help make this happen. After all $480 / £480 all in is a very significant outlay, and Guitar Pedal X is entirely self-funded. It’s quite normal in this industry to engage in a fair and equitable value exchange - ...

My first encounter with Markus’s Reeves Electro Pedals was courtesy of Brian Wampler’s Instagram repost on May 4th last year. This is a great example of serendipity where legions of fuzz fans were introduced to something genuinely new and innovative by a leading taste-maker.

Brian’s Insta-share was of the immaculate point-to-point interior wiring of a 2N2FACE Fuzz - Markus’s take on the Silicon Fuzz Face - utilising 2n2222a Transistors. This is a rare occasion ...

And so here is the culmination of everything that happened to the pedal-chain in 2020.

There were quite a few more displacements than I had expected - all told 22 slots changed over this year - including 19 Brand New Pedals for 2020, then 3 slightly older pedals, and some incidentals.

The most significant shift, and the one that caused the most disruption was the arrival of Boss GT-1000 CORE in October. This is often the case when you bring in a big new pedal - and you need to...

It is fairly evident that my favourite pedal genre is Fuzz - seeing as that of all the pedals I added to the collection this year - 80 of those were Fuzz varieties.

This particular selection consists of 31 pedals across different sizes and sub-genres. And of those 31, I personally own 22 of them. All the remainder are of course on my wishlist, these are :

• DanDrive Secret Machine (I own Secret Weapon edition)
• Dusky Electronics Augustus Octave Fuzz
• Fjord Fuzz Fenris Super-Fuzz

You may recall that back in April I reported how I had received delivery of 3 fantastic Mini Fuzz Pedals from Dave ’Pickdropper’ Friesema, and I shared some of the highlights from that burgeoning Mini Pedal Range. With my first order I took delivery of a Clusterfuzz Mini, Professional MKIII and Hive Mind Fuzz (Baldwin Burns Buzzaround). I then spotted a new custom 2-knob MKI variety on the Pickdropper Insta, and asked Dave if he couldn’t oblige me with a 3-knob version thereof...

Reverb.com has revealed the best-selling pedals of 2020 on that particular platform. And while there are plenty of other big retailers on the Interweb - Reverb is likely the largest single entity - so some heed should be paid to these stats, while they don’t necessarily give you the full global picture. Plenty of manufacturers sell direct - and you have all those major stores - with Andertons, Sweetwater and Thomann leading the charge - which play into things too. Nevertheless it always ...

This is probably the most anticipated of my 12 Degrees roundups - and is a touch more complex and different to the other 2 in the series. Within each category here there can be a huge difference in character and output - for instance with Fuzz Faces going from quite mild to rather searing Meathead and Regulus VIII levels of aggression. So the gradual step up in gain per category doesn’t apply here. And because of circuit variations and differences in components and construction, each and ...