Here it’s the turn of the new distortion pedals this year. Where I own all but 7 here :

• Crazy Tube Circuits Heatseeker Enhanced Full Stack Marshall style Preamp
• God City Instruments Brutalist Distortion
• Krozz Devices RoyalBreaker Extended Rat style Distortion
• Noise Engineering Dystorpia Fuzz/Distortion
• Soldano Super Lead Overdrive Plus
• UAFX Anti 1992 High Gain Amp
• UAFX Knuckles ’92 Rev F Dual Rec Amplifier

So of this selection of 34 I own 27 :

Finalists

• Audiostorm Grand

I’m going to start this month’s roundup with a couple of conundrums that I’m still kind of wrestling with.

Firstly about my old friends at Sinvertek, whom I can’t but think that they might have jumped the shark with their latest release. It’s another spin off of the Scream Honey line - the 4th or 5th in that series. Mr Wu seems to introduce tiny improvements each year, and every other year we get a price rise too. On this occasion the offering is two pedals - supposedly both slightly different ...

This is my 4th Nordland Electronics pedal - and all have been brilliant, in fact I would put up the ODR-C-30A, and ODR-CS up against anything - both rightly featured in my 12 Degrees of Saturation 2023 Compact Editions.

And this newest sibling - the MT-11 Mosland is right up there at the top of its tier.

For certain circuit engineers, you have a consistent element / sound signature, that you can hear in all their pedals - even though each sits within a different genre. I’ve said it ...

And so to my roundup of the best gear of the year - apologies of course if I’ve overlooked one of your favourites - and note again that this year I’ve split out Boost & Overdrive - and Distortion separately - as there are so many new pedals that it’s tough to fit them all into a single summary overview. Some of these pedals are incredibly extended range - and if I’ve used them more on the distortion side - you will find those listed in the very next Distortion Rundown article - like say the...

At the start of the week I covered the Vemuram Shanks ODS-1 as part of Rob Chapman’s favourite pedals rundown. The Vemuram goes for a stinking $385 - it was the priciest of the Rob Chapman select - and is the priciest option here.

Obviously Nobels have just recently released a Metallic Gold 30th Anniversary edition which makes the formerly binary Bass Cut hidden in the battery compartment - a full granularity mini-knob on the front facia. So the Anniversary edition is pretty much identical ...

This article has been a long time coming - where I originally started this ahead of the Mini Edition - which went live on January 24th. I was waiting for a couple of new pedals to be released - while the article has been iterated around 20 times now with a number of recent additions.

And the pedal I was waiting to launch still hasn’t quite happened, while the builder has authorised me to tease it in advance of its official release. And if I were to do the same exercise tomorrow - no doubt ...

The innovation with the original 1993 Nobels ODR-S was that the unique Spectrum Tone Stack of the ODR-1 was swapped out for a more granular 3-Band EQ. In that version the Bass and Treble controls were active, while the Mid control was a range sweep. For the ODR-CS the Mid band is Active now too - which means you can cut as well as boost each of the frequency bands.

The most obvious visual difference for the ODR-CS is the G.D.C. mini knob - which stands for Germanium Drive Control. The core ...

So this was truly a full-throttle month - with so much activity this month and a really busy NAMM release schedule. We also had a couple of JHS Faux Hist this month - some real and some not so much.

The month saw my most popular article ever on Instagram - the Iconic Pickup one - with currently 17.6K likes - still growing as the number of followers surpassed 8,000. It’s been a really grad graft slowly making my way up that slope - but some of the recent Guitar Elements posts have really ...

What a magnificent start to the year -  I don’t think I’ve ever had such a strong January selection - I could almost stick a pin in it and take the rest of the year off! Several of these slots won’t see much change between now and the end of the year - and so impressive is this latest batch of additions - that I can’t really see what might be improved in order to replace most of those.

I was not expecting to add the Eventide H90 quite so quickly - while the Hologram Microcosm has always ...