GPX Blog

I’ve already largely decided what new pedals I will be targeting this year (that I know of!) - following on from the various reveals and announcements made over the last week, and other projects I’m aware of and various themes I will be pursuing in 2020.

First of all to explain the above visual - this features and extrapolation of my current pedal-chain - with the NAMM legend in front of various new / newish pedals - Green means already acquired - or at least already ...

So despite the perilous state of the world, the first NAMM of the new decade actually turned out to be pretty stellar. I had thought that last year’s exceptional show might end up as the all-time high water mark - but this one turned out just as many pleasant surprises.

Slightly different to last year there were a more significant number of pedals announced and launched in advance of the show - while a lot of pedals at the show had very little by way of collateral and some are ...

I’ve been a huge fan of the Sinvertek ’5’ series distortion pedals - owning all three in succession - the No.5 Distortion, the N5 Drive and now the N5 Drive Plus - in all its 7-knobs and 5-toggle-switches glory. This was actually my last pedal to arrive last year - in that it arrived just before Christmas. I had been chasing it since its June Summer NAMM announcement - but it wasn’t released until December of last year.

I’ve been patiently waiting for some...

What we have here in the Powerball EP645 is a Made-in-Germany highest quality components High Gain Distortion pedal which Engl have built themselves to sound as close to their own well-loved signature Metal Amp.

On the surface the pedal looks rather elegant in its simplicity - just a 3-Band EQ with Volume and Gain - no additional clipping, gain structure, brightness or tightness controls - and no resonance or presence. Yet the output is a very satisfying dynamic and full amp-like ...

Contrary to my original analysis - all 3 pedals are actually pretty well rounded and ready to go - while Jackson Audio want to give each a chance to reach their intended audience - meaning a staggered release - with the first to be made available being Joey Landreth’s signature Golden Boy Overdrive ($299) - pre-orders will be up any day soon with shipping due to start in February. The pedal gets its name from a statue which sits atop the Manitoba Legislative Building in Joey’s home ...

I caught some early preview snaps of these on Instagram - and have been waiting for a while for better resources to appear yet to no avail. In the end I had to make my own composites from the best reference I could find online as it does not appear Jackson Audio will be releasing proper details during the show. I was able to do decent facsimiles of the Modular Fuzz and Golden Boy - and will do the El Guapo Distortion image/overview separately / additionally later - as and when better references...

We had seen teaser images of both pedals prior to NAMM and for the RevivalDRIVE I wasn’t sure if it was just a different colourway, but it was pretty obvious that the smaller of the new pedals was most likely some sort of Tremolo variant - and we now of course have confirmation that it’s actually based on a 1962 Fender Deluxe Brownface combo amp.

I was of course a big fan of the RevivalDRIVE when it first came out and was one of the first to snap it up and write a fairly ...

Panos Sotiropoulos recently reached out to me to remind me of Vs Audio’s 3 really cool new pedals - which are exactly the sort of thing GPX / I typically gravitate towards. These could have been handy to feature before or in my recent ’6 Key Guitar Pedal Trends’ feature, but they arrive equally serendipitously to support several of the key arguments put forward in that article.

On the surface we have two analog bucket-brigade-device based pedals with digital control ...

When the original Life Pedal (pictured in background above) was launched around 6 months ago I rather liked the concept of the pedal - which is really a kind of souped up Rat-style distortion with extra bells and whistles. Yet I somewhat balked at the size, format and price of the device at around $429. The Life Pedal was originally launched by Sunn O))) as a package deal with their latest -’Life Metal’ album and was part of a 1,000 unit limited run. Since then we’ve had a run...

I’ve long mentioned that we’re living through the second golden age of effects pedals (some say ’Diamond Age’’), and as good as things have been - 2019 took it all to an entirely new level of excellence. I don’t recall any previous year where we’ve had quite the same degree of innovation and so many ingeniously appealing pedals - this year has been so fast and furious - it’s been difficult to keep up at times.

I noted in my End of Year ...