Readers will know that I’ve long been chasing an original all-chrome MI Audio Tube Zone overdrive - to complete my MI Audio Capsule Collection. It was always going to be a matter of acquiring as pristine an edition of Tube Zone - as opportunistically as possible.

While my good friend and Australian native Ben Bordiss took matters into his own hands and grabbed a slightly tarnished edition - which I still have hopes of restoring at some stage. Ben did all of this off his own back and shipped...

So these 14 are some of the pedals that continue to evade capture for me. Most of these are discontinued and were only made in  very limited numbers. Some of these are small batch productions - like the GNI Octa Fuzz and Iron Ether FrantaBit. And some are also impossible to get outside their country of manufacture. Some of these I’ve been chasing for nearly a decade so far.

Many of you will be familiar with my quest for the Blakemore Effects Deus Ex Machina OpAmp Muff - where I tracked down...

So the current Voxy & Plexi slots are #18 and #19, while the first formation occurred back at the start of 2018 - with the Bearfoot EGDM on slot #15, and the MI Effects Super Crunch Box V2 on slot #17 - we’ve obviously come a long way since then! That original pairing had a very decent 2 year innings. Which was actually a few month more than the enduringly popular Pettyjohn Electronics pairing. Of all of these - those 2 pairs have endured the longest, with the Menatone TBIAC + KOB duo putting ...

As has been variously covered on this site - I have a rather extensive reference collection of pedals - amounting to somewhere north of 1,300 currently - and where well over half, or 700+ of those are fuzz variants - including more than 110 Big Muff types, more than 100 Fuzz Faces, and somewhere over 50 Tone Bender variants.

I often enjoy the symmetry of specific pedal pairs - and have a number of those in the collection - where this feature is one such subset - really just the most obvious...

This article has been a long time coming - where I originally started this ahead of the Mini Edition - which went live on January 24th. I was waiting for a couple of new pedals to be released - while the article has been iterated around 20 times now with a number of recent additions.

And the pedal I was waiting to launch still hasn’t quite happened, while the builder has authorised me to tease it in advance of its official release. And if I were to do the same exercise tomorrow - no doubt ...

Readers of this blog will know that I’ve long and consistently had 2 key pedal types in my pedal-chain - namely a Brian May Vox style pedal, and an Eddie Van Halen Marshall Plexi style pedal - which for the last number of years have populated slots #17 and #18.

My very first pairing was the hybrid set of Bearfoot FX EGDM and MI Effects Super Crunch Box V2 - which overall probably served the longest innings on those two slots.

Since that first pairing we’ve had matched brand pairs - from...

Readers have heard me refer to my ’Infinite Wishlist’ - which consists of a mix of new releases (Weeks & Months), relatively recent releases (Years), and older releases (Decades) that I either missed out on or was oblivious to at the time. What’s special about this process and exercise - like many things in life - and reminiscent of my DJ-ing days when it was all about a very specific version of remix - the same is the case with pedals - where the pedal reference and particular iteration is...

This edition comes rather hot on the heels of the recent 12 Degrees of Overdrive version as many readers’ inquiries questioned a couple of missing categories there - which I explained would rather figure within the Distortion contingent which is present here in all its glory!

As always, these is some considerable amount of grey science at play here - best typified by the Big Muff and Rat circuits - which are both very much distortions as well as fuzz varieties. I have 3 x 12 ...

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 ...