GPX Blog

Followers of this site will know by now that I’m a big fan of Jackson Audio, and I’ve already put in an order for their brand new Broken Arrow Programmable Soft-Clipping Overdrive + Boost. I was amongst the first wave to adopt both the Prism and Bloom when they arrived on the scene, and now the Broken Arrow continues that legacy of smart footswitch-controlled innovation.

The control-layer technology on the Broken Arrow is identical to the Bloom - whereby you can press and ...

I had encountered Demon Pedals several times in passing - I have certainly been aware of them for a number of years now but am still not sure where I first clocked them, yet they were one of the first brands that came to mind when I did my ’German Pedal Builders’ feature - while back then I had not wholly been won over - I needed some additional spark to get fully onboard. Turns out that spark was their newest pedal - the Kondo Shifuku D-Style Overdrive - which captivated me on ...

This article continues the series which I started with Best of British, Canadian, French, German and Italian Pedal Builders - some of which could do with updating probably, but frankly I prefer doing new stuff. It turns out that Greece is actually a significant hub of activity with a number of Internationally renown brands.

I feel the big 3 are Crazy Tube Circuits, JAM Pedals and Tsakalis Audioworks, while VS Audio also has had some significant publicity fairly recently and ...

When I did my Stackable Overdrive + Distortion Pedals feature at the start of the year my intentions were always to do a follow-up with Distortion + Distortion Pedals, and the recent release of the KSR Ceres makes it opportune to do this now. For my former article I could have included a few others in the overview - I just selected the 4 most similar, while for this new one I actually struggled to find even the 4 included within the same category. And of those 4 the Suhr Eclipse is kind of ...

I’ve only just very recently provided a list of my 20 favourite Marshall Style Pedals - and obviously some of those have been separated out into the heavier High Gain category - but when you focus on distortion you can’t really get away from Marshall to a large degree - such is its influence on these types of tones. In fact 14 pedals are retained from the Marshall article and 10 more somewhat different varieties have been added.

If you’ve recently read the Marshall ...

After doing lots of more individual flavours of drive pedal overviews recently - it’s time to do another roundup of that most eternally favoured of amp distortion tones - the many flavours of Marshall. There are a few here that are based on JTM45 sounds - but generally I’ve separated the Bluesbreaker style pedals into their own category. Most of these are within that classic rock heyday range or sort of Plexi through JCM800.

I’ve tried to indicate most relevant Amp ...

I’m known for my 12 Degrees of Saturation Methodology and organising drive/dirt pedals into a specific category. I do however also like multi-talented multi-tankers, and have always had one or two all-rounder multi-drive overdrives in my pedal-chain. In fact of the 9 listed here I have all but the last featured, which also happens to be the most recently released - by Greek Boutique Builder Tsakalis - that pedal is currently only available in Greece - direct from the maker and from one or...

So per the recent NAMM coverage we know that there is a new compact version of the RevivalDrive coming down the line - and a raw prototype alongside likely facia design were on display at the show. The RevivalDrive was my favourite new pedal of last year - I have the Custom version with all the additional EQ options - alongside the additional 2-button footswitch. I wrote in my ’RevivalDrive First Impressions Article’ how much I like this multi-drive/PreAmp pedal - and how I use all ...

So it’s that usual post NAMM-haze time where I figure out the longer-term impact of NAMM, and how those new products will affect the layout, order and composition of my now sort of 40-slot pedal-chain. As noted several times - this was indeed a bumper year for really innovative and highly appealing new pedals - and I will look to accommodate a number of those as they materialise in the forthcoming months.

As I hinted in my last pedal-chain overview - while 2018 was very evidently...

This year’s show has seen a bumper crop of interesting new pedals. In fact I was so dazzled by all the various cool pedals that I did not take note of much else - actually not entirely as there were a few synths weirdly that I liked the look of - including the new Teenage Engineering Modular Series in particular. There were very few guitars or amps though that properly piqued my interest.

Special thanks to Delicious Audio / Stombox Exhibit / 60 Cycle Hum and Premier Guitar in ...