GPX Blog

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 ...

So within my pedal chain I have 4 key low-to-mid-gain overdrives ranging from Klon Style, to Tube Screamer Style, to Dumble Style and onto Blues Driver type - the way I have it each gets progressively gainier, in fact I have a 5th medium gain overdrive - which used to be an OCD, but has now been displaced by the Hamstead Intergalactic Driver. The idea is to have the most suitable pedal in each slot - one that combines superb dynamics, tone, versatility and smart form factor and features.

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I will make lots of disclaimers and provisos at the start of this piece. To my mind there are actually relatively few proper quality intended OCD clones - the Joyo Ultimate Drive, Mojo Hand FX Rook, Mooer Hustle Drive and Vick Audio Tree of Life amongst them. The rest here all have significant overlap and share certain aspects of the OCD tone although not necessarily the whole frequency range / a direct correlation.

When I acquired the Hamstead Odyssey Intergalactic Driver shortly ...

NOTE - newer update : [here]

I have already covered off some of the simpler Envelope Filter pedals in my piece on Wah / Auto Wah pedals. All of those featured here are somehwat more feature-rich and add different flavours into the mix like fuzz, phasing and oscillation. I tend to me more aligned to the more compact pedals - so most of these are a little large for my needs, my Boss MD-500 has some superb filter options too and really supplies me with most of the envelope filter ...