The Bolster Dual Fuzz consists of a 3 x 2N5088 Transistor Tone Bender MKII adjacent High Gain Fuzz on one side, and a single knob OpAmp Speaker-destroying Fuzz on the other side. The 5-knob Transistor Fuzz has an enormous gain range from drive and fuzzy-drive through to fairly searing high gain fuzz - and then when you add the More Fuzz in - you kind of blow the doors off - in the best possible sense.

All the finesse is on the first channel, while the More Channel - comes in somewhat high-...

I thought I should focus on my large format heavy-hitters for a change - where these 8 are some of my largest, most potent, and best favoured gain pedals. They are arranged here in alphabetical order, while they were released in the below chronological order. All 8 have featured heavily in my rig at different times - and all 8 are still very valid award winners and still in rotation. While the enormous girth of the Elektron Analog Drive means that is gets somewhat less of a rotation nowadays - ...

I initially covered this subject in mid-January - where I announced the arrival of the Tru-Fi Minis. 5 were initially made available, but at my time of coverage only 3 had reached the UK. Since then Teddy has released 3 more variants - and now 8 Minis in total have been released.

All 8 Mini Editions are now at Joe’s Pedals in the UK - priced at £199 each, where the original Tru-Fi USA price is $199 - all very fair.

Each of the 8 pedals are equivalent or better than the original larger size...

After the quiet comfort of February, March unleashed an avalanched of work - both in terms of new releases and acquisitions, but especial in the field of Guitar and Pedal expos - where I attended 3 within a month - first The Birmingham Guitar Show at Cranmore Park, then the London Synth and Pedal Expo at Studio 9294, Hackney Wick - and then back to Birmingham for the Noise Maker Market at Centrala, Digbeth - all grand events.

I burned myself out a little this month, and came back willingly empty...

Ian made some PCB’s of his take on the Big Muff 2, which takes the best elements from the large and nano format Big Muff 2’s, as well as the Bass Big Muff 2 - and adds some further enhancements. For me the Gig Buff 2 is louder, punchier and more articulate than the stock BM2 - it’s much better balanced overall and I much prefer it over my original stock nano edition. The V2 PCB’s are still available on the Gigahearts Webstore, and go for just £10 - obviously you need to buy in your own ...

This project has been a long time in the making - I actually started off this compilation properly last autumn, and then have iterated the final selection a number of times since then - before reaching this final format. I apologise to anyone whom I’ve inadvertently left out - I still have a number of Octave Fuzzes to require - that task is never ending!

I own around 80 octave fuzzes so far - and this is near enough half of those - where I’ve mostly leant into compact editions - and ...

The Bashtanka is a mostly unadulterated take on the recent EHX Big Muff 2 circuit. Vitalii wanted to explore the potential of that circuit, with additional fixes for Low-end filter (e.g. 0.7Hz filtering in the original gain section looks odd for an audio circuit and might cause issues); Vitalii moved those to 15Hz.

The key mod is a tone switch which sits between the Big Muff tone-stack and a simple Low Pass Filter (louder, no mids scoop). On the components side - Vitalii deployed MC4558 ...

January has been a bumper start for the year - with lots of killer arrivals - especially the DSM & Humboldt Dumblifier which I’ve been hugely impressed with.

Also my most formidable NAMM coverage to-date - where I only started work properly on the 8th of January - but have managed to do 60 articles since that time - which is a record of course, as is the week of 20 posts.

I feel I covered all the key moments - and mixed up new and old in my usual inimitable fashion.

There was ...

As I predicted - very shortly after the JHS-led large format Big Muff 2 (which is still available), we got the compact EHX variant at half the price, and less than a third of the size!

Readers will know how I feel about unnecessarily large format pedals - which is why those original / styled EHX pedal types are far from my favourites. Where I will almost always prefer a compact pedalboard-friendly take on that circuit.

My friend Ian at Gigahearts has done his own personal take on that ...