Reader Charles H requested that I do a roundup of Clean Blend Overdrives - which resulted in the following selection. Most Bass Overdrives have Clean-Blend by default - while all the ones I have selected here are more specifically Guitar Overdrives. I personally don’t find myself needing to use Clean Blend so much - but I can totally understand why so many players find this functionality useful or even essential. The Blend knob is variously labelled Blend, Clean, Dry and Mix. I’ve ...

I am a little late to the Animalizzer - which Ricardo ’Rikk’ Cabecas officially launched in May of last year. Readers will know I’m a big fan of extended-functionality and extended-range pedals in particular. And the Animalizzer is pretty much definitely the most shapable of all the different Muff types out there in the wild - certainly at this size of enclosure.

In fact so shapable is the Animalizzer that it can be used as a sort Boost, Overdrive and Distortion in ...

This article really speaks to my own personal preferences in pedal-acquisitions, and how I’m always somewhat more drawn towards extended-range - and typically enhanced and evolved editions over and above the stock originals.

In many cases those more versatile editions are even rarer than the classic vintage originals. Meaning I always try to secure those more difficult-to-find examples first. On this occasion I still intend to grab a LM741 opamp early grey or yellow variety ...

It was only natural that the Compact Format Preferred Versions feature should follow the Mini examples. Again largely inspired by the recent ’12 Degrees’ projects.

Once more I’ve had a change of mind on some of the candidates and the preferred examples are slightly different to those previous references. Obviously new pedals have arisen, and priorities and preferences can shift fairly regularly based on prevailing mood.

That said, most of these are long-term...

So Reverb.com has just announced which limited edition pedal collaborations go on sale today - Tuesday 23rd February - to further celebrate the imminent release of ’The Pedal Movie’. The first two pedals went on sale last November and sold out pretty instantaneously. 1000 of Chase Bliss Audio + Zvex collaboration Bliss Factory Fuzz, and 1000 of Death By Audio + EarthQuaker Devices collaboration Time Shadows Subharmonic Multi-Delay Resonator.

Both pedals were rather original...

As a strictly non Bass Guitar owner/player I rarely feature specifically Bass gear, and when I do - it is typically from Darkglass as I really admire what they do - in terms of their signal processing, aesthetics, and smart modern technology and interfaces.

I have not seen any guitar demos of this unit yet - I don’t believe any are official yet, while Darkglass say it’s great for Guitars too - but this was obviously developed very specifically for Nolly - for his own ...

Final details are still somewhat scant at the moment - while it seems to be clear that the Ultrawave is some sort of revival and update of the old Soundblox 2 Multiwave Distortion. Where the signal is split into several different frequency bands which are individually processed, clipped, gained up and modulated - and then combined to spectacular effect.

How you can manipulate these different bands is really quite extensive and yields elaborate variants of Tremolo, LFO Wave Shaper and ...

For Alex to miniaturise his formerly BB-enclosure pedals, the Multi-Clipping Element was always going to be the trickiest part to incorporate - because of the dimensions of said rotary pot, and all the Diode Component Pairs which made up each Clipping option.

In the process of miniaturisation the enclosures have seen a significant change in aesthetics - with more of an outline print artwork onto a raw enclosure - and accentuated by those beautiful / vibrant and colour-coded CBA-style ...

This is one of those articles that’s been a long-time coming, and where I needed to spend a rather large chunk of time getting fully under the skin of the pedal in question - the really quite superb, but also somewhat slightly flawed Boss GT-1000 CORE Guitar Effects Processor.

I must start by stating that I came into this project with somewhat lofty expectations, and there was some degree of naivety to my beliefs as to what was contained within this pedal, and more importantly ...

And so here is the culmination of everything that happened to the pedal-chain in 2020.

There were quite a few more displacements than I had expected - all told 22 slots changed over this year - including 19 Brand New Pedals for 2020, then 3 slightly older pedals, and some incidentals.

The most significant shift, and the one that caused the most disruption was the arrival of Boss GT-1000 CORE in October. This is often the case when you bring in a big new pedal - and you need to...