GPX Blog

Like many others I’m guessing, my first exposure to DanDrive Pedals was courtesy of Joey Landreth’s brief Secret Weapon Fuzz appearance on a relatively recent That Pedal Show Episode

I confess that I was not fully aware of Dan and his super high quality brand of Fuzz Pedals until that very moment - which is rare for such a Fuzz fan as me.

DanDrive Pedal Solution has actually only been established for a couple of years now - with the earliest official record being...

I’m not entirely clear on how I first got into Basic Audio / John Lyons, but I did get the Scarab Deluxe very early on in my Fuzz ToneQuest - followed then by the Futureman and Gnarly in rather quick succession, and leading to where I now have 11 from this very extensive and flavourful range. Update! I’ve just added the Foxton to make it 12 now.

I think if you are a fuzz fan like myself then you really cannot ignore John Lyons’ Basic Audio Fuzz Pedals - there is no ...

As with many pedal builders, the roots of Daniel’s Fjord Fuzz are firmly embedded in a particular music scene. In this instance Bergen on Norway’s West Coast - one of the 4 main corners of Norway’s creative arts - alongside Oslo, Stavanger and Tromsø, and famously home to a number of internationally celebrated artists including Annie, Erlend Øye / King’s of Convenience (sic) / Whitest Boy Alive, Datarock, Kygo, and Ralph Myerz / and the Jack Herren Band. ...

This article is somewhat in response to the fairly recent arrival of my long quested for Spaceman Gemini IV (originally chasing the III), and the imminent arrival of my DanDrive Austin Pride Fuzz. In fact when I was working on my last but one article on Tone Benders I was in two minds as to whether to include Paul Trombetta’s Bone Machine GTX - as I’m not 100% clear on what its circuit provenance is and exactly which fuzz family it is supposed to belong to - in the end I determined ...

I started down my Fuzz ToneQuest at the beginning of 2018 - where I already had a few fuzzes, but determined that over the course of the year I would acquire around 30 of the very best fuzzes available across the different fuzz families. My aim was to get the bulk of my research done in 2018 so I could move on to investigating other pedal genres - like say Glitch/Granular Synthesis/Micro Looping.

As it happens though - I got to twice as many fuzzes as intended in 2018, and have ...

I have covered off a number of my favourite Summer NAMM pedals already - including the Boss 200 range, RC-10R and SY-1, the Fulltone OCD Ge, the REVV G2, the Spaceman Effects Gemini IV, and Walrus Audio Kangra for instance. And there’s a couple more surprise ones I will be posting as dedicated features very soon - so stay alert for those! In the wake of one of the best ever Winter NAMM’s it was clear that the Summer NAMM could never match that degree of innovation - in fact most of ...

Australia and New Zealand together have a fair few brands of international repute, and I for one certainly have a number of pedals of Australian origin in my collection. Foremost amongst those is Michael Ibrahim’s eponymous MI Audio / MI Effects - from which range past and present - I have 7 to date - with a couple more on the ’nice-to-have’ wishlist. Of the ones I have 2 are permanent features in my pedal-chain - the Super Crunch Box V2 (my Brown Sound pedal of choice) and ...

OK so let’s set the record straight right away - these are not vintage pedals - but rather vintage circuit replicas housed in modern compact enclosures which have in turn been deliberately aged and relicked! So these are really mixed media concoctions of sorts but very successful executions all round actually.

The Breakdown is based on the much larger 1968 wah/rocker style Univox UD50 Uni-Drive pedal which had two knobs - Pedal Range and Input Level to go with the variable gain ...

This is the 11th in the Pedal Builders Country Series as such, although I’ve had to cast the net slightly wider as I currently don’t consider there to be enough top-tier / International-level builders in a single country here to satisfy the usual criteria. Brazil and Argentina come fairly close - with Brazil having significantly the most concentrated volume of builders of any Country in that part of the world. Generally Brazil, Argentina and Chile are particularly well represented. ...

This is one of those moments that I feel that my celebrated Pedal-Chain has reached another milestone of ’peak performance’. There are a number of new releases here - and probably all the big ones I was expecting this year - bar the Chase Bliss Audio / Benson Amps Automatone MKII PreAmp - which is due in the Autumn now - and still pending final pricing, but will probably take up the top spot on Slot #14 eventually. Also - my long-awaited Beetronics Swarm Harmonizing PLL Style Fuzz ...