It was only natural that the Compact Format Preferred Versions feature should follow the Mini examples. Again largely inspired by the recent ’12 Degrees’ projects.

Once more I’ve had a change of mind on some of the candidates and the preferred examples are slightly different to those previous references. Obviously new pedals have arisen, and priorities and preferences can shift fairly regularly based on prevailing mood.

That said, most of these are long-term...

This article is in part inspired by my features on ’Mini Pedals State of the Art’, and those various ’12 Degrees’ posts I did at the tail-end of last year. Moreover I have had quite a few readers recently asking me for my preferred recommended mini pedals on various pedal-chain slots.

I last did this sort of exercise 4 years ago - where TC Electronic was kind of the dominant player - covering 8 of those 20 recommendations, with Mooer fairly close with 6 entries...

DigiTech’s latter sister brand DOD has delivered a number of pedal greats over the years, and since its foundation in 1973 by David Oreste Di Francesco. A lot of people focus on the early editions / 200 Series - while I’ve taken a slightly broader overview here - with the one concession really being the original 250 Overdrive/Preamp. Elsewhere I’ve gone for pretty much the latest viable editions - including the Blue reissue of the 201 Phasor - which also had Grey and Yellow ...

Hot on the heels of the Darkglass ADAM comes another wonderful modern confection of disparate parts - from those creative Japanese fellows at Banana Effects. I’ve still to get in a few of their minis - but his may be even more enticing still.

Actually a fantastic 8-Step Sequencer / Arpeggiator with all kinds of clever tricks up its sleeve - including numerous onboard presets and handy DSP subroutines.

I will give you a general features overview first - as below - which ...

Free The Tone’s Brand New Motion Loop Pitch Shiftable Short Looper reminds me of a sort of cross between a DigiTech Whammy Ricochet and Chase Bliss Audio Mood. At its core this seems to be very much a Micro-Looper style of pedal with extended Parameter control.

Essentially the pedal can sample up to 4 Seconds of sound - which you then manipulate in various ways. There are 4 main effects sections as such - Pitch, Loop Signal, Waveform and Delay.

The Pitch shifter gives ...

The amount of different versions of Helix is now almost getting to pandemic levels - with Line 6 offering up yet another variant - in the guise of the HX Stomp XL.

The stats for this really could not be any simpler - as what you are getting is essentially the exact same HX Stomp Unit - with largely all the same functionality and screen - but with 5 more footswitches - for more Stompbox mode switches, and the ability to select up to 4 different Snapshots.

All the ports on this ...

Dune fans will undoubtedly appreciate this theme a little more than most. And in fact the Atreides is based on Electro-Harmonix’s now vintage 1980’s Mini Synthesizer.

What we have here is a perfect complementary amalgamation of different modulations with a hearty Fuzz and Sub-Octave element. There are 7 lit-up sliders for which in the above visual I have highlighted in red text how they group / break down.

Essentially we have Output Volume, then Sensitivity and ...

This is one of those articles that’s been a long-time coming, and where I needed to spend a rather large chunk of time getting fully under the skin of the pedal in question - the really quite superb, but also somewhat slightly flawed Boss GT-1000 CORE Guitar Effects Processor.

I must start by stating that I came into this project with somewhat lofty expectations, and there was some degree of naivety to my beliefs as to what was contained within this pedal, and more importantly ...

And so here is the culmination of everything that happened to the pedal-chain in 2020.

There were quite a few more displacements than I had expected - all told 22 slots changed over this year - including 19 Brand New Pedals for 2020, then 3 slightly older pedals, and some incidentals.

The most significant shift, and the one that caused the most disruption was the arrival of Boss GT-1000 CORE in October. This is often the case when you bring in a big new pedal - and you need to...

So I’ve now completed 5 preliminary shortlists type articles featuring between 9 and 30 or so of the best pedals released in 2020 - in each of the following categories :

• Best New Reverb Workstation Pedals (9)
• Best New Overdrive and Distortion Pedals (29)
• Best New Fuzz Pedals (31)
• Best New Delay and Reverb Pedals (20)
• Best New Modulation, Pitch, and Utility Pedals (28)

I sincerely apologise if I’ve overlooked any here, while I’m not sure they would have necessarily ...