GPX Blog

After my 28 strong Compact Tone Bender roundup it was inevitable that I would do the same sort of thing with Big Muffs. My understanding and experience has of course improved immensely since I last did a proper Big Muff overview, and here like I did with the Tone Benders, I try to select a representative selection by each of the different main varieties of Muff - as indicated by icons in my above visual.

Even though Kit Rae’s Big Muff Page identifies 12 specific versions of Big ...

Last time I did a Tone Bender overview I limited the selection to 12, and as much by chance as anything else I still managed to get a pretty decent roundup of most of the main Tone Bender varieties although not quite all as featured here. In the world of fuzz though only the Big Muff can compete with the convoluted and complex nature of the Tone Bender Family Tree - which I will endeavour to distil first, and then extrapolate into my own favourite / preferred pedals!

It all starts with...

This particular post was triggered by a recent video I came across which compared the various Mini Klon/Klone style pedals (Not Nano!!!) doing the rounds at the moment. I see lots of posts about the Mini Mosky Golden Horse on Pedalboards of Doom these days - but there is only one proper Golden Horse - and that’s the Decibelics one - more of that later.

After viewing the Mini head-to-head comparisons I then flipped across to the Australian Super Fun guy’s Klon review from ...

This feature was inspired by a couple of recent events, and partly as a counter to my highlighting of the really rather complex Empress Zoia Modular Synthesizer / Multi-Effects unit in my last feature. For the last week or so I’ve been working on updating my rather extensive Guitar Pedal Directory page which features all of the above, and around 2,000 more from across 160 or so pedal builders around the world.

I periodically review each of the sites referenced - to keep tabs on ...

This article is prompted chiefly by my fairly recent acquisition of the Demon Pedals Kondo Shifuku D-Style Overdrive - which brings my tally of Dumble style drives to three - or 7 kind of, depending on how you characterise these things. The very first Dumble Style pedal I acquired was the Mad Professor Simble - which I still love, but substituted eventually with the more versatile Wampler Euphoria. While both those are excellent conveyors of the kind of Dumble tones I was looking for - the ...

This is essentially the last piece I will do in a while on the Wampler Pantheon - which I am so enchanted by currently. I honestly feel it’s Brian’s best pedal to date, and I was a huge fan of both the versions of Tumnus and Euphoria. The Pantheon comes into a pretty crowded arena where there are already a number of stellar pedals present.

There’s a lot of debate about whether a pedal is a clone of a certain circuit which I always find kind of overly academic - and I ...

I am known for writing lists and cross-tabulating and cross-referencing the contents thereof while I consider which is the best / preferred choice for me. Note that there is never really a ’best’ overall pedal, simply the one that best fits your circumstances and needs. I have lots of characteristics and attributes I look for - including a compact pedal enclosure size, with versatility and added smarts - great tone is sort of a given here. I an one of those tone-tweakers who quite ...

As an update to last year’s piece, and in line with my slightly tighter real estate now (39 pedals), I have decided to go all out on compact format pedals on this occasion. As a subset of my ’12 Degrees of Saturation’ we are dealing with stages 2 to 6 in essence, which largely covers 6 families of overdrives in order of how I set their gain level (increasing amounts) - ’Klon’ type, ’Tubescreamer’, ’Dumble’, ’Blues Driver’, &rsquo...

UPDATE - When I originally wrote this piece in October of last year, I seem to have overlooked some of the more compact pedals - possibly because they were hard to get or out of stock at the time. Now as my pedal-chain has reached 39 slots, there is no way I could accommodate anything beyond a compact-size pedal - so I’ve appended those original choices to this features - namely the Analog.Man Block Letter Envelope Filter, the Mu-FX Micro-Tron III and VFE Mini Mu.

I have already ...

Newer feature [here]

Unless you have a ready spare £50,000 - £100,000 - few of us will ever own a genuine Alexander Dumble Overdrive Special amp - of which only around 300 were built. There are various sound-alike / clone amps to a degree - like the Fuchs Overdrive Supreme (c £2,000) or Two Rocks TS1 (c £4,400), yet we pedal aficionados prefer to reproduce such tone in more compact enclosures. To be wholly circumspect here, each of the amps mentioned have a ...