I’ve followed Rabea Massaad for quite a few years now - and while I’ve not attended any of his Toska, Dorje or Frog Leap gigs yet - I’ve been to a number of his impressive Guitar Clinics - including at the last Birmingham Guitar Show most recently.

I’ve obviously grown up with Rabea mostly courtesy of his association with Rob Chapman and Lee Anderton / Andertons - having watched most of his output on those channels - including in particular ’Sounds Like&...

August has been another impressively busy month with lots of excellent new pedal releases which has certainly kept me on my toes. I always thought August used to be a fairly quiet month in the annual release calendar. While I guess this year there have been so many delays - because of parts supply issues and the like - that lots of launches have been unusually pushed back - which means those pedals just weren’t ready until about now.

I am particularly impressed to have got my ...

It seems like Mooer and Flamma are playing some sort of game of ’Pass-the-baton’ where Mooer started down this path with its cool 7 Series of Mini Pedals - each with 7 Algorithms / Presets onboard.

Flamma Innovations then introduced Stereo to largely those same circuits and upped the enclosures to Compact Size. And now Mooer’s X2 (Times Two) series doubles down with no less than 14 Algorithms / Presets onboard, Full Stereo Ins and Outs, and Dual-Footswitches - so you ...

Since we have had 5 cool new and formidable Stereo Reverb pedals this year - it seems opportune to review the category and figure out which are the standout options and alternatives - past and present.

My own journey into Reverb started with the Strymon BigSky - which was my mainstay for a while, then Source Audio announced its new Dual-Channel Ventris and I was very keen on that - but that edition was very slow to materialise, and so I moved instead to Boss’s excellent RV-500 ...

Neunaber has massively levelled up from its much celebrated compact Immerse Reverberator with its 8 Algorithms - Wet V3, Plate, Hall, Spring, Sustain, Echo, Detune, and Shimmer.

The new Illumine more than doubles the amount of Algorithms to 17, with 5 Parameter Controls for each. A very compact horizontal BB-size enclosure with highly visible screen and top-mounted jacks sets it apart form most of its competitors - which are typically much larger affairs.

My only ...

I’m a little late to get stuck into GFI System’s New Slimline Medium Enclosure Series - which was launched with the Orca Delay and Skylar Reverb back in May of this year. That new format of pedals borrows a mix of features and functionality from GFI’s now former Compact Horizontal Series - i.e. Clockwork Delay and Specular Reverb, as well as its flagship Synesthesia Dual-Channel Multi-Modulator.

In fact it looks like the Orca and Skylar are actually replacements for ...

So this is the culmination of my first ever ’Boss Month’ concerted focus on everything Boss! I do hope you enjoyed the broad sweep of all those articles - and had some fun with my speculative projections and suggestions. The natural end to all of that is of course to set out the pedal-chain as a Peak Boss implementation - using what I have within my extensive Boss collection. I of course had to add a few more units - but only a handful really. I’m guessing some who don’t...

These are exciting times as another brand enters the Big Box Workstation Pedal arena. An area typically dominated by Strymon, Boss, Eventide, and to a lesser degree Empress Effects and Universal Audio. Eventide really kicked this sort of thing off with its quartet of ModFactor, PitchFactor, Space and TimeFactor. Before Strymon kind of took over with its Mobius, TimeLine and Big Sky.

I largely have a mix of Strymon and Boss in this area with the Empress EchoSystem too. It seems that IK ...

In a number of my Boss features and reviews I’ve noted some of the disparities between the GT-1000 CORE Parameters / Algorithms and those generally available in other parts of the range - particularly in the 200 and 500 Series pedals. I thought it would be a good idea to do a general overview of exactly where the GT-1000 CORE sits in relationship to the Total Boss Parameters available within the range. At launch, the GT-1000 CORE only had around half the Effects available in the obviously...

I’m a huge fan of Red Panda’s output - I love the V2 form-factor and extended feature sets of its 5 core pedals. In fact I should really own more - while the only one I’ve thus far acquired has been the V2 Particle Granular Delay.

At this year’s virtual Winter NAMM Red Panda introduced their new and improved Bitmap Bitcrusher - which is fantastic and category-leading, and this week for Summer NAMM they have updated their remaining Raster Digital Delay to V2 ...