The catalyst to this post is of course the brand new 3-Germanium Transistor Queen Bee Fuzz - which Mike has recently launched via his Custom Shop. I was really just waiting for its price to materialise before sharing this ’best of’ roundup.

Despite Mike’s idiosyncrasies and several dubious outbursts as such I’ve regardless always admired his circuit-designs and his overall highly consistent quality of work. In fact I own 8 of his pedals to date - while only 3 in...

I’ll jump straight to the obvious here in calling this Boss’s contender to go against current category leader and long-term reigning champ - the Line 6 Helix HX STOMP Multi Effects Processor and Amp Modeller - which interestingly retails for $599 in the USA, but only around £399 on this side of the pond. While starting RRP tag for the GT-1000 CORE will be £615 (vs GT-1000 currently retailing at £799UK/$999USA). In fact prices are weirdly quite disparate between UK,...

And so as my 7th month of isolation draws to a close - the frequency of new product releases has begun to accelerate again after the lull of summer. The month started on fine form with the slightly surprising snap arrival of he new Jackson Audio El Guapo, next we had the Walrus Audio Julia that always should have been - in the guise of the new and improved Julianna Chorus, then the Zander Circuitry Compact Siclone, Boss OC-5 Octave, somewhat delayed Big Ear Albie, the EHX Pitch Fork+, Red Witch...

My introduction to Toneczar was courtesy of another somewhat underground legend - one Dennis Kayzer of Hamburg - who demo’d a lot of Ed’s pedals a good 7-10 years ago. I of course only came across those rather more recently - or some 4/5 years ago actually - where I developed a fondness for the Openhaus High Gain Distortion and Vault High Gain Fuzz in particular. I’m not 100% clear on the provenance of the Openhaus in terms of which thundering high gain amp tones its ...

For the fourth / FGIV iteration of his Fuzz God Series - Ben returns once more to the horizontal BB-style format that most of the predecessors were encapsulated in. This time around we get 3 combinable footswitches so you can add both Germanium Diode Octave / Octavia effect ’8VE’ as well as ’Wrath’ Oscillation. Those two modes are not fully independent as they can only be deployed in conjunction with the main Fuzz voicing - you can though stack either with the Fuzz or ...

My readers will know that I’ve featured Joe’s Pedals a fair few number of times on this site - in reference to where I acquired several of my own pedals from. My first introduction to said boutique was in search of Marc Ahlfs’ Skreddy Pedals. In fact 5 of my 8 Skreddy’s have come from Joe’s and I would have gotten more had those been in stock when I needed them - such is always the luck of the draw with pedal acquisitions - in that you cannot always get everything ...

August was quite a slow month in many ways - particularly for those of us clinging to the last vestiges of hope towards the arrival of a Buffalo FX Reticon Flanger. That now seems a very distant pipe-dream indeed as reports indicate that Steve Painter is suffering from some horribly debilitating condition that prevents him from doing any physical activities for the foreseeable future. He’s not officially responded to any communiqués since June 30th - the last day many of us heard ...

I frequently get asked to recommend a great all-rounder every*man kind of fuzz pedal, and over the years as my own collection as grown - so has the roster of usual suspects in my recommendations, I felt that it was about time to have the definitive list up on this site so I could simply refer people to that.

There’s still quite a few more outliers here - and for reasons of symmetry I judiciously decided to omit them from inclusion on this occasion - but there are certainly a few ...

It seems very timely that not long after I’ve finally landed my targeted Danelectro 3699 Fuzz - two further examples appear almost at the exact same time - Stomp Under Foot’s medium-BB-size Silver Fox and the full-size exact Foxy Tone Box replica from studio gear specialists Warm Audio.

In this instance you pay for feature-set and modernity really as the smallest box is the dearest at $199, while Warm Audio’s near original version with NOS parts is going for a very ...

July has largely been a very decent month for me and culminated with the arrival of my twin new Expresso FX Dual Custom Fuzzes and my annual white whale as such - the Chase Bliss Audio Automatone Preamp MKII on this occasion.

It looks like 4 pedals failed to get over the line within the appointed time period - the longest-ranging of which is my Evil Pumpkin Modded DS-1 - which has been en-route from Kiev since June 12th and which I surely hoped should have landed by now.

My ...