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 ...

So I seem to have fallen into something of a Josh Smith ToneQuest phase of late. I’ve always been a fan of his core signature tone/s while not necessarily the biggest fan of his musical output per se. His first influence on me was his signature Eventide H9 Rotary preset - which settings I share in this post. I have somewhat fallen into using my own H9 mostly in Josh’s Rotary mode - with a few choice reverbs and delays too, but modulations generally coming from other parts of my ...

I had hoped to do regular monthly updates on how the various NAMM-announced pedal releases and other newer additions were impacting my own pedal-chain choices. Yet we all know how this year has gone - obviously impacted by numerous delays brought on by the Social Distancing required to counter the spread of Coronavirus / Covid-19.

Because of parts supply and resourcing issues, most 2020 NAMM pedals have been delayed to some degree. When there is uncertainty as to when the next ...

Usually I limit these roundups to the 9 best from each brand - but I felt that the visual for that was a little gappy because of the different enclosure sizes! So in an effort to balance out the visual better I upped the limit to 11 - which allowed my to do a couple more interesting things with the listing.

These listings are based on a mix of my own personal favourites and more widely considered best pedal ambassadors for those ranges. For a lot of selections here there was an either ...

I’ve already featured a couple of these on the site previously - first the Tone Capture GTR in ’Making your electric guitar sound Acoustic’, and then the E7 Synth in my ’Mini Pedals State of the Art’ piece. These essentially take the same 5 knob + 1 push-button chassis used for Mooer’s Micro PreAmps - and add in 7 Presets - punctuated by a column of 7 LEDs on the left-hand edge of those enclosures.

What this means is that apart from the Tone Capture ...

My current reverb of choice (the one on active duty) is the Source Audio Ventris - which I very much like, and has been by principal Reverb for a while - following on from my Strymon BigSky and Boss RV-500 which I still rotate in on the pedal-chain every now and again. I stated recently that I so liked the GFI System Synesthesia Dual Channel Modulation Workstation - that I would wait for GFI to bring forth its V2 Specular Tempus Delay + Reverb in that very same ingenious format.

In ...