This exercise has totally underlined just how much of a tone genius Andy Timmons is. His pedals are selected incredibly carefully and deliberately - and don’t just have that certain glorious sound about them - but beautiful dynamics, harmonics, smart guitar volume gain clean-up and an abundance of musicality. 

Andy wrings magic out of each and everyone of these pedals - and his Halo Dual Echo algorithm / preset is amazing - and can sit under anything and make it sound at least 50% percent ...

Each of the months this year has been pretty exciting in several ways while we’re still facing various unprecedented delays in getting our hands on new pedals. I’ve had numerous talks with industry insiders this month and it seems that the order cycle for certain components - particularly in any sort of quantity - is as much as 18 months now. Shipping costs are still near an all-time high, while some of the container shipping is starting to come down a fraction - but still nowhere near pre-...

As you can see from the flurry of activity during the last week of the month in particular - April has seen the culmination of 3 very significant projects  - which is mostly reflected by the end-of-month Pedal-Chain snapshot.

It was not as if I was short of an overdrive or two, having around 150+ to-date to choose from, but I always felt I was missing a few classics, and in the last couple of months in particular - I made a real concerted effort to make my reference collection fully ...

Readers will know that I’m quite the fan of Digital / Hybrid pedals - where the Strymon Riverside and Sunset in particular have been pretty much permanent fixtures of my pedal-chain since they first came out. I’m obviously a fan of the Boss OD-200 too and did a significant in-depth warts-and-all review of it when that materialised. More recently I have acquired both the Mooer Preamp Model X X2, and Neunaber Neuron Gain Intelligence Preamp / Multi-Drive pedals.

The Boss and Strymons are ...

So I last did one of these back in 2020 - meaning that these ’Best of Overdrive’ run-downs seem to be a circa biennial affair. We’ve upped the numbers to 32 this year, while they represent barely a quarter of the overdrives I have in my reference collection - so there are obviously a lot of honourable mentions listed below - before the Final Thoughts section.

These types of exercises are incredibly tricky to strike the right balance of generally considered classic overdrive pedals and ...

This Grand Finale has been through several iterations and some very advanced Tetris-style re-arrangements. Last year I had 25 finalists, while this year I’ve upped that quotient to 40! I still would have liked to have included a few more - including the EQD Hizumitas, but in the end felt this was about right on balance. 

As I’ve already covered all of these in the very recent end of year category rundowns - this article will just be listed mentions - bar the 3 sort of specially singled out ...

And so to the final pedal category roundup - ’Time-Based Effects’ - before I reveal the Best of the Best New Pedals for the year. This category is not quite as congested as the others - and while last year was for sure the year of the reverb - we did see a few more prime examples during the year. I guess this year was also to a tiny degree the year of the Analog Delay - with some great new contenders there too!

For my own preferences - I am almost entirely a Stereo Workstations guy when it ...

August has been another impressively busy month with lots of excellent new pedal releases which has certainly kept me on my toes. I always thought August used to be a fairly quiet month in the annual release calendar. While I guess this year there have been so many delays - because of parts supply issues and the like - that lots of launches have been unusually pushed back - which means those pedals just weren’t ready until about now.

I am particularly impressed to have got my hands on the ...

Since we have had 5 cool new and formidable Stereo Reverb pedals this year - it seems opportune to review the category and figure out which are the standout options and alternatives - past and present.

My own journey into Reverb started with the Strymon BigSky - which was my mainstay for a while, then Source Audio announced its new Dual-Channel Ventris and I was very keen on that - but that edition was very slow to materialise, and so I moved instead to Boss’s excellent RV-500 next.

The...