The 3 Pedal Challenge was in constant circulation last year on a variety of discussion groups, and I’ve kind of been biding my time in the hope I would have more options to choose from by now, but there has been no significant addition this year to unseat any of my established selections.

There are various ways to go about the 3 Pedal Challenge - where some individuals simply just select their 3 favourite pedals - without any particular rhyme or reason. While for me it’s a ...

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...

I think it’s clear now what Tore Mogensen has been up to since leaving TC Electronic. Harnessing all those great plugin algorithms already used in Universal Audio’s various Audio Interfaces. I must say I’m quite taken with the elegant styling of those recessed milled aluminium enclosures. I know the jury has been somewhat mixed - but generally I feel those look pretty classy and distinct.

My immediate takeaway is that these very much seem to be targeting prime Strymon...

The 6th card in my series is very much core Tom Majeski territory as a number of his original hardware boxes operate in similar areas - just with a few more parameter controls at your disposal - this is more like a subset of that actually. This can in some ways be considered somewhat adjacent to the Generation Loss Card - with some interesting oddities thrown into the mix to spice things up.

Two of these modulations are likely my favourite Arcades algorithms to date - also in how they ...

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 ...

Upon first seeing this pedal it calls to mind both the Strymon NightSky and Walrus Audio Slö to a degree - both of which offer somewhat similar Octave and Shimmery Reverb delights. The Astral Destiny is very obviously very much dedicated towards adding in floaty textures above and below the baseline. It’s actually a pretty straightforward and elegant reverb by and large - and extremely successful in delivering those floaty cosmic / ambient tones.

The Control Topology could ...

There’s no question about it - Walrus Audio has delivered a killer reverb in every which way - and which properly challenges the bigger reverb workstations. This is a darn fine bit of engineering to get all this magic to fit within a compact enclosure. I dare say this is even more impressive than the Mako D1 Delay - certainly for my tastes.

I’m almost instantly smitten after having viewed just a couple of demos. My current thinking is that this could be a great rotational ...

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...