Joe Gore’s Filth Fuzz is his second pedal to really pique my interest - following on from the Clipping Supremacy of his Gross Distortion. The Filth supposedly has 2 fairly unexciting and run-of-the mill Silicon Transistors at its heart - with knobs for Drive and Level, and two mysterious sliders at the top and right-hand side of the pedal facia.

Those sliders are dual Bias controls, albeit not straight-up Q1 and Q2 Biases, where Joe describes those as combined controls for ...

May turned out to be another pretty busy month as far as new releases and the overall collection is concerned. I personally acquired around 20 or so new pedals - with some further acquisitions not having landed yet.

Obviously a fair amount of new Overdrives and Phasers in particular - while May covered most of the key pedal categories in one way or another. And most of the pedal-chain additions for the month have been reviewed or touched on in some way previously - with the exception ...

Readers may recall that I’m not exactly overly keen on pedal enclosures with top-mounted knobs - preferring instead to have top-mounted jacks and forward-facing controls. So as reported, I wasn’t that enamoured with the initial Babee Series Fatbee Overdrive - it really depends where it goes on the board for it to be fully practically and usefully accessible and easily tweakable and visible. While I may come around on the Fatbee eventually!

However, and somewhat against my ...

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 ...

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 - ...

With the fairly imminent arrival of the 3,000 limited-run edition Boss TB-2W Germanium Tone Bender MKII, I thought it opportune to do a brief potted history of Boss’s compact fuzz pedals. Note that according to latest updates, the wholly sold out TB-2W pedals will not be going out until late May now. This is a little later than the Late April/Early May date range that was the originally advertised. Each of those pedals requires separate hand-calibration and setup with extensive testing ...

I would like to start by apologising to those builders who didn’t get a pedal featured in Wednesday’s final 32 Key Guitar Effects Pedal Types article. Know that I hold you all in the highest of esteem - and that said overview is/was simply a somewhat temporary and fleeting snapshot of my current preferences on that day - with a particular emphasis towards versatility and variety delivered by a single pedal. So some pedals are typically more narrowly focused and specialist, while ...

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, ...