I’ve finally picked up a Hotone Verbera (normally $299 / £249), where I paid £229 at Andertons - super good value, and I’ve been incredibly impressed right from the start. The control interface is mostly pretty intuitive - and the value of this pedal is hard to beat. It could even be my favourite Reverb workstation to-date - but it’s a little early to call - I normally give it at least a few months!

It’s been a long time coming - and has been held off for quite a few months by a combination...

I’m lagging a little behind on these now - as Hotone has delivered a second excellent pedal for its Neon Collection / Series - an equally cool looking Freqlux 3-Voice Pitch-Shifter with a tonne of features onboard - including 200 presets slots, with 100 superior factory presets already loaded.

I still need to land the Hotone Verbera Convolution Reverb - where its high current draw initially put me off a little (rated @ 1000mA) - but I was later corrected - as that high current number was ...

In many ways this is the most straightforward category with singular award nominees - GOLD, SILVER and BRONZE.

It’s the second smallest category after Distortions - and the one where I own the least number of pedals in proportion to the whole - just 10 out of these 26.

The order pretty much set itself - with the Cornerstone Nucleo being the clear winner from the start. I’m so impressed with every aspect of that pedal - it’s a perfect Trifecta of Design, Feaures and Playability - pretty ...

I own a fairly significant number of Reverb Pedals - where I’m mostly focused on Workstation style Pedals with multiple algorithms. I normally have at least 2 Reverbs on the board - a Primary Multi-Verb, and a Secondary more Specialist Verb. Occasionally I have a 3rd Reverb - which can be another Stereo Secondary, or more likely a Mono Tertiary. In fact I can have as many as 4 Reverbs on the board - as the Eventide H90 is always there too!

You can see from my various Pedal-Chain posts that ...

So this Hotone Verbera is the diametric opposite to the Crazy Tube Circuits Mirage I featured yesterday - but still at its heart a Dual Reverb. Where the Mirage has 16 fixed algorithms per side, and this one allows you to make use of 200 Presets - with 120 smart IR’s already loaded onto the device from a number of different sources. The are a combination of IR Reverbs and Studio Engineered Presets.

This is not my first rodeo as far as Convolution Reverbs go - my first of that kind was the ...

February can often seem a rather odd month after the hustle and bustle of NAMM Show January - where a lot of new stuff always gets announced - while increasingly outside the NAMM schedule - but certainly in and around it! Projects delayed from the previous year often get released in January, but this year those kind of seem to be more spaced out - with some not feted to happen until March / April. February always seems slow compared to January, and that sometimes extends into March too before ...

In my recent review of the Kernom Moho Magmatic Fuzz - I already lauded it to the high rafters as the greatest Multi-Fuzz pedal ever created. It’s the perfect tool for proper fuzz fans - and in particular for those who have fully mastered the relatively tricky Zvex Fuzz Factory and similar - all those should get along with the Moho fabulously. Newbie fuzz fans may find the device a little tricky to dial in - as every knob impacts the texture and tonality of the output - so pretty much all 6 ...

This article is in part inspired by my features on ’Mini Pedals State of the Art’, and those various ’12 Degrees’ posts I did at the tail-end of last year.  Moreover I have had quite a few readers recently asking me for my preferred recommended mini pedals on various pedal-chain slots.

I last did this sort of exercise 4 years ago - where TC Electronic was kind of the dominant player - covering 8 of those 20 recommendations, with Mooer fairly close with 6 entries, Wampler with 2 and then ...

This post is inspired by the recent launches of the Hotone Omni AC and Mooer Tone Capture Pedals. Before that, the long-standing champions of Acoustic Simulation were the Boss AC-3 and smaller Mooer replica - the Acoustikar. While SIM1’s slightly pricey XT-1 is a sort of more elaborate version of Tone Capture - coming with several high quality presets onboard by default.

Each of these pedals does things slightly differently - although there are degrees of overlap for some of ...