GPX Blog

By all accounts a rather fabulous and timely pedal, in a great form factor, yet a couple of things have me a touch peeved from the outset. One fairly minor, while the other is likely a lot more significant. On the minor side - I always get somewhat annoyed when builders are overly opaque about the mechanics of their pedals. Seymour Duncan does not mention what manner of technology generates the tone, while one would guesstimate OpAmp as the likeliest source - I am one of those who likes to know...

So I thought I would combine the Mini Pedal selection with the final overall category roundup featuring my current favourites and forthcoming/future acquisition targets. The above visual may be somewhat convoluted, but it well illustrates the trade off in footprint and practicality/utility you get across the different enclosure form factors.

I’ve stated before that I’ve largely moved away from the larger styles of enclosures in favour of more pedals of a more compact nature...

This is probably the penultimate article in this series for the year - actually I might do another with my own personal favourites from all of these selections. Next up will of course be compact enclosure variants, but here we are at the other end of the scale with the Big Boxes of Metal! A reader asked me why I had not included the Friedman BE-OD Deluxe in the previous category - Horizontal Medium Enclosure - and the fact is that it’s just a touch too large. I have my own system of pedal...

This article follows on from the recent Vertical aspect medium enclosure roundup where I indicated a number of potential acquisition targets. Here we have the same enclosure size but width-ways in orientation - with a key differentiator being the number of pedals here with dual footswitches - where all but two either have a second Channel or additional Boost option.

There are two permanent fixtures of my pedal-chain here - the Empress Heavy and MI Effects Megalith Delta which have ...

Most of you should have seen by now my ’Yellow Means OverDrive’ (9) feature which covers off all of Boss’s Yellow OverDrives, and more recently I did a piece on ’Boss’s High Gain and Metal Distortion Pedals’ (9) - so this article covers all those remaining Boss Drive and Distortion Pedals (13) (past and present) which exist between those two extremes.

This article is written with a view towards the forthcoming OD-200 Hybrid Drive Workstation which in...

In advance of the arrival of the OD-200 I thought it would be good to do an overview of Boss’s own various Drive and Distortion pedals. In my recent ’Yellow Means OverDrive’ feature I covered off all of those particular Boss pedals, so this article is at the other end of the scale of gain - the High Gain and Metal Distortions. I will then follow up with a 3rd article covering those drives and distortions that sit between these and the 9 OverDrive pedals covered already.

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Keeley are getting to be rather good at these limited special editions as I’ve commented on several times previously. Once again they’ve drawn in painter Phillip Ortiz for this cool space-themed diorama / panorama. I actually noted in my recent Walrus Audio Best of Range Overview that they should do some sort of Space panorama as that’s where much of their pedal artwork sits. If you muted these tones a little or rather duo-toned this, then this is exactly the kind of design ...

My first exposure to Thorpy - way back when, was the then monikered Muffroom Cloud Fuzz - a fantastic sounding and really versatile take on the original Triangle version EXH Big Muff Pi. At the time though I was slightly put off by the somewhat over-sized enclosure - which was both significantly longer and wider than my preferred compact enclosure size - so I campaigned hard to have Thorpy bring the box down in size somewhat. This did not look like it was going to happen - and I eventually ...

We all knew that the OD-200 was going to be a killer Boost/OverDrive/Distortion pedal - but Boss has managed to surprise those of us who thought we had it figured out. We weren’t initially totally sure how the Parameters and Boost options were going to work - I already really love the versatility and adaptability of my Jackson Audio Broken Arrow - which encompasses 4 Drive Types alongside 4 Boost Types. Yet Boss ups the ante on that somewhat exponentially.

I thought the core of ...

I’m a touch late to the party with this feature - as it’s been quite a while since Zvex announced and sold out of the very first Fuzz Factory edition of this new limited-run line of pedals. They are pretty much identical in content, components and format to the original classic horizontal compact pedals - bar for the use of fully transparent / see-through Lexan enclosures. Lexan is actually a super hard plastic compound or version of Polycarbonate - a thermoplastic polymer - often ...