The ’Blackie’ Guitar is Matt’s favourite weapon of choice - and his main studio tool as such across so many albums. It features at least 3 different pickups - as listed below, I feel the original version of this guitar also had a Piezo pickup in the Bridge. Also onboard are a Kill-Switch, MIDI Control Strip (for Digitech Whammy etc.), an FL Wah copper control pad and further controls, and a Zvex Fuzz Factory. The core guitar features 3-way Pickup Control with accompanying volume and tone knobs....

Probably the strongest selection of the year - each one of these is amazing and sounds killer. But then agin similar was true of the Overdrives. I’m very much a fuzz fanatic - so his selection has to take the edge - what a selection!

This selection includes 3 from EarthQuaker Devices, 2 from Drunk Beaver, 2 from Fjord Fuzz, and 2 from ThorpyFX.

It also includes the likely pedal of the year - within a selection of 10 award winners here - these are so good - I could have labelled even ...

Another super busy month for me - particularly towards the end - with numerous large scale articles out this week. That also coincided with my busiest week of the year for my other day job. Meaning that I was up until 4-5 in the morning every day - just to keep up with my commitments.

I was already somewhat shattered and burned out before I even got to this super busy period - and it’s a relief that all that work has now been completed on schedule.

I’m especially proud of my work on the Bucket ...

This has turned out to be something of a Thorpy month! - following on from the recent Manson Supermassive Black Fuzz and 3 Thorpy acquisitions this month - indeed the Supermassive is also engineered by Thorpy!

I thought I should do a quick retrospective of pedals and projects that Thorpy has been involved in.

I selected my favourite pedal from those 4 brands (some singular options!) :

• Redbeard Effects : Bearded Vulture Direct Drive with Octave
• Victory Amps : V1 The Jack Guthrie

What we have here is an incredibly potent fuzz - consisting of 3 x OpAmps, 3 x Silicon Transistors, and 2 x Blue LEDs - so the core fuzz flavour is already immense and richly textured - very much ’Supermassive’ in its output. And you then have an impressively powerful tone stack essentially - consisting of an expansive Filter [Warp] (350Hz > 5kHz) used in tandem with a wide-ranging ’Q’ bandwidth control [Dimension]. So essentially a sort of semi-parametric EQ - where you set your chosen ...

When I first encountered the Supermassive Black Fuzz - I thought the Footswitches + LED arrangement looked very familiar! I found out later that indeed this was another Thorpy Collaboration - where Adrian designed the circuit, and the custom enclosure for Manson - while the artwork and labels are their own!

There was a fateful meeting at London’s RAK Studios - where the key proponents all met up for the first time!

It’s well known that Matt Bellamy favours the Zvex Fuzz Factory Circuit ...