OK - so it’s taken a little while to process this all, and I really did not think I would be in line for acquiring another Reverb this year - especially considering how many formidable releases there have been in this genre in the last few months - and with the looming introduction of the Chase Bliss Audio / Meris Automatone CXM 1978.

Early rumours pretty much indicated that it was going to be some sort of Reverb, and there were lots of nods to the Ursa Major Space Station SST-282 - but...

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 will start by rightfully thanking Tom for allowing me to participate in this second launch phase and granting me all the access I needed to delve deep under the skin of his highly innovative pedal. If you read my original April 28th Arcades feature you will note that I was smitten by this formidable Multi-FX unit right from the first encounter. I had spent a very considerable chunk of 2019 getting stuck into a variety of glitch style effects and associated multi-fx pedals - including the ...

This post was triggered by a number of readers asking me for my take on the recent Modular Synth Multi-FX phenomenon. Where I composed a fairly long-form answer for one Joe D - and promised to make that part of a more circumspect review (this one!) where I compared the different approaches of Canada’s Empress Effects and the more recently highly newsworthy Poly Effects of Australia.

I myself am very much your typical guitar pedal enthusiast - who deploys a rather insanely complex...

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 ...

June hasn’t been a particularly kind month to me - in fact it’s been something of a difficult period - I was going to call this piece ’The Darkness Lingers’ but didn’t really want that particular NLP on this blog - which I try to keep as positive as is practically possible.

A number of ventures and collaborations I was working on this month came a cropper when the other collaborating parties somewhat inexplicably and suddenly ended their involvement - ...

In a recent piece I slightly bemoaned the prevalence of second edition pedal iterations that held more appeal than the originals - and how that if you bought to soon you might end up with an aesthetically inferior model. So this article is the direct antidote to that where I highlight pedals than in my opinion look best in their original release artwork.

Pedal Design is very much an applied art - where name, function, format and colourway are all expertly selected and combined to ...

May was the month that several things finally slotted into place - all my missing / presumed lost USA orders finally landed as did a few other pedals which had been somewhat lingering in the wild - so May delivered a pretty decent pedal yield overall in the end. I also got to be involved in a couple of exciting up-and-coming brands - Kuro Custom Audio of Italy and MidValleyFX of USA. I’ve already published a feature on the excellent Kuro Akuma Fiery Fuzz as featured on slot #5, and hope ...

So a lot has changed during the month of April - we’ve had some thoroughly exciting and invigorating new product launches, while three of my American acquisitions are seemingly lost by USPS - hopefully they will materialise some day, but for one of them there have been no tracking updates for over a month now - which is somewhat alarming. As the eternal optimist, I can only hope that things right themselves eventually. I had already determined that my pedal-acquisition would go on semi-...

I’ve long been a fan of Tom’s even though the only one of his creations I have to date is the Chase Bliss Audio Edition of his Generation Loss. I long considered his Moment Machine Pitch-Shifting Workstation, before I decided it was probably a little too large for my needs, and I had the recent Outward V2 on my imminent acquisitions list.

It’s as well really that I hadn’t hit the trigger sooner on that one, as Tom is obviously being influenced by the same ...