The precursor to this article goes back quite a while actually to conversations I had with the wonderful Alex Millar (Zander Circuitry) at a number of guitar shows. Those chats as such included discussions on knobs and form factor / enclosure size - and while I’m not laying any claims to influencing the recently evolved Zander Circuitry boxes I still like to think I played some tiny part in that decision making process.

This style of article ’Maverick Inflection’ is a...

August was quite a slow month in many ways - particularly for those of us clinging to the last vestiges of hope towards the arrival of a Buffalo FX Reticon Flanger. That now seems a very distant pipe-dream indeed as reports indicate that Steve Painter is suffering from some horribly debilitating condition that prevents him from doing any physical activities for the foreseeable future. He’s not officially responded to any communiqués since June 30th - the last day many of us heard ...

I frequently get asked to recommend a great all-rounder every*man kind of fuzz pedal, and over the years as my own collection as grown - so has the roster of usual suspects in my recommendations, I felt that it was about time to have the definitive list up on this site so I could simply refer people to that.

There’s still quite a few more outliers here - and for reasons of symmetry I judiciously decided to omit them from inclusion on this occasion - but there are certainly a few ...

This article was obviously inspired by last Friday’s That Pedal Show (TPS) episode with similar title. In watching that I thought - hang on a minute - I have all these pedals, with the Chase Bliss Audio Automatone Preamp MKII the most recently added. So before the episode - 3 were already in my pedal-chain - the Chase Bliss Audio Brothers Analog Gainstage since it first came out, the relatively recent Jackson Audio Golden Boy, and of course my brand new Automatone Preamp MKII.

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I was a little late to Matt Pasquerella’s Stomp Under Foot (SUF) superior range of mostly Big Muff Style Compact Enclosure Fuzz Replicas. Besides the original - Electro-Harmonix’ Mike Matthews, I consider Matt to be one of a quartet of the leading proponents of the Muff sound - alongside Marc Ahlfs of Skreddy Pedals, Matthew Holl of Wren and Cuff, and Mike Vickery of Vick Audio.

The first SUF pedal I properly encountered was the Dirt Preacher - courtesy of a Nick Jaffe demo...

I thought I should do a sort of recap roundup of some of the recent more extended-range fuzz pedals that have been in my considerations. Two of these I have had in my possession for a wee while - The Fjord Fuzz Berserk V2 and Kuro Akuma - while the Pettyjohn Rail Fuzz is currently winging its way towards me - and should hopefully land relatively soon. The Catalinbread Giygas is riding high on my acquisitions wishlist but I have yet to pull the trigger on it - I have pretty much decided that yes...

This story obviously starts off back in the late 90’s with Lovetone’s original Big Cheese Fuzz - which was a highly distinctively voiced 4-mode silicon transistor fuzz circuit in a somewhat over-sized enclosure by my measure. Those fuzzes variously utilised either 3 x BC549 or 3 x 2N3904 transistors. For a variety of reasons they were only available for a handful of years and more recently became very sought-after on the second-hand market - where examples were fetching in the ...

Several people predicted that following on from the pricey $400 hand-wired 1966 Range - which I wasn’t entirely complementary about - that Josh Scott would release more mainstream SMD style devices covering the same sort of territory. In the launch video (per Final Thoughts below) Josh mentioned that there would likely be 10 pedals in this new series - with the above 4 being the first available. I expect the Legends of Fuzz Series to overlap very significantly with the 1966 Range ...

It turns out that I’m quite the fan of Zach Broyles and his many circuit confections. And despite having only been officially properly in business for a handful of years now, Zach’s output is really rather prolific and a number of his classic circuits are already discontinued. Most of you will know his story of how he started dabbling with pedals while working at celebrated guitar hangout Carter Vintage. He got to a stage where he had established enough contacts with clients and ...

This post was triggered by the eventuality that my long-serving Emerald Green Distortion Machine - my Boosted Vox style pedal of choice - will soon be yielding its sport for a while to the incoming new Menatone Vertical Top-Boost-in-a-Can.

I’ve always had a soft spot for Bearfoot FX pedals and was somewhat ignorantly collection Bearfoot, Mad Professor and OneControl pedals before being aware of the Björn Juhl BJFE connection. It has to be said that Björn is one of the ...