Many who read my blog don’t know that I used to work in advertising - mostly brand origination / development - and we dealt with a lot of copyright and trademark issues over that time. You quickly get a feel for how close you can sail into the wind - and the truth is mostly not that close at all! Of all of these replicas only probably the first one could be argued away against a top copyright lawyer - the other 5 would pretty much come under straight-up plagiarism - but there are other factors ...
It’s been a while since I last did a Vox-in-a-box roundup - in fact all the way back to my 2018 12 of the Best Vox Style Pedals feature - so it was about time I did an update. Readers will know that I always have a Vox pedal in my pedal-chain - occupying what is now slot #17.
It started with the Catalinbread Galileo way back when - and then following this rough sequence :
Much like with the recent 32 of the Best Compact Overdrive Selection I now own all these Mini Fuzz Pedals featured here. Actually where the Decibelics The Reverend (Mini Expandora) has yet to be officially released - I should be receiveing the latest prototype any day now, and judging by Guillem Vilademunt’s previous Mini Masterpieces we have every reason to look forward to that one.
Other than that - everything is now in the collection - while this larger quest is nowhere near complete yet...
I had been meaning to do this exercise for quite some time - and have had a number of readers chasing me up about it - since my last Dumble Style Pedal overview was way back in February of 2019, and where I listed my then 9 favourite candidates - including three that I owned. This time around I’ve thrown 18 hats into the ring or twice as many as the last roundup.
The delay occurred in part because I was waiting for my friend Brian Mena to officially launch his V2 Dumbstruck pedal - which ...
This is the 4th of my recent ’12 Degrees’ Series - this time moving beyond the boundaries of gain / saturation into the area of modulation. There are of course many more than the 12 modulations I have selected here - there are aliasing, ring modulation and lo-fi signal degeneration effects as well as more complex multi-combo effects, splicers and complex pattern modulators - including for instance the excellent recent Big Ear Albie. Of course the more obscure the category of ...
So this is one of most significant works in a while, and carries on the legacy of two of my most popular all-time articles on the 12 Degrees of Saturation - the Original that evolved in the early months of 2017, and the follow-up which materialised in September of 2018.
I obviously deal with a lot of reader inquiries pretty much on a daily basis, and one of the more popular lines of inquiry has been about overdrives. And while Josh Scott attests to the fact that there are only 5 core ...
This article was triggered by a question from Ryan C who wanted my take on the Boss OD-200 vs the Strymon Sunset - and why the latter was a more permanent part of my own pedal-chain versus the seemingly more capable and full-featured OD-200 - which I will endeavour to answer here as best I can.
I decided to widen the selection as far as possible and get in a few more alternatives for sake of comparison - while that task proved a lot tricker than I had foreseen. The key criteria were to...
So I seem to have fallen into something of a Josh Smith ToneQuest phase of late. I’ve always been a fan of his core signature tone/s while not necessarily the biggest fan of his musical output per se. His first influence on me was his signature Eventide H9 Rotary preset - which settings I share in this post. I have somewhat fallen into using my own H9 mostly in Josh’s Rotary mode - with a few choice reverbs and delays too, but modulations generally coming from other parts of my pedal-chain.
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A reader pulled me up on the fact that I had not included the Walrus Audio 385 Overdrive in my recent 28 Best Compact Overdrives roundup. In fact, as I stated then - there were a number of equally great overdrives that just missed out on that listing for a variety of reasons, but still deserve a mention.
This post seeks to highlight a few more exceptional overdrives which really play on touch-sensitivity and feel and pick-attack - where playing technique is a significant part of the ...
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...