GPX Blog

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 ...

We’ve been waiting for the full reveal on this one for a while as the first teaser image for this was Insta’d on the 14th of September last year. There were some expectations that this might feature at Winter NAMM, but it seems it’s only now fully formed.

What we have here then is all of TC Electronic’s TonePrint-enabled pedals in a single unit and available across 5 any way configurable slots. This means you get all the different variations of effects from the ...

When Keeley released its XVIII Anniversary Space Panorama Triptych I stated at the time that the artwork was somewhat more reminiscent of Walrus Audio - and surely they (Walrus) should be doing some sort of space-themed panorama across a number of pedals, as several of their pedals already carry that kind of sci-fi theme. I don’t know how related these two events are - but it sounds like someone was listening somewhere along the way and Walrus now has its own ’Luna’ Lunar ...

I’m still picking off some of the stragglers from the recent NAMM show - and I was waiting for a few more details on this pedal to emerge - where we now at least have a decent reference photo, but no sign of price or availability yet.

This looks like a really cool pedal - a 3-mode combined Reverb and Delay with very simple controls. It has 4 knobs - Mix, Tone, Reverb Decay and Delay Feedback - to go with its 3 toggle-selected modes :

1. Ambient Reverb + Analog Delay
2. Modulated

Of all the pedal brands I collect - I seem to have ended up with significantly more Boss than anything else - with currently 27 Boss Pedals all told. And while it’s not always the case that Boss has the most pedals represented in my active pedal-chain - it just so happens that right now my active Boss pedals number 7 - as follows per pedal-chain order:

• SY-1 Synthesizer
• BD-2 Blues Driver Keeley Freak Fuzz + Phat Mod
• OD-200 Hybrid Overdrive
• NS-2 Noise Suppressor Alchemy Audio Modded

During NAMM there were some product catalogue leaked images for a quartet of forthcoming EHX pedals - the 1440 (Fourteen-Forty) Stereo Looper, Big Muff Pi Hardware Plugin, Pitch Fork+ Polyphonic Pitch Shifter, and Oceans 12 Dual Stereo Reverb. At the time of the event there were little or no proper details available - while these are now filtering through to dealers for pre-orders and have the proper descriptions attached. With the exception of the Big Muffi Pi Hardware Plugin which has still ...

This article was of course inspired by Josh ’JHS’ Scott’s recent YouTube video on his own favourite TC Electronic pedals (see Honorable Mentions below). We are funnily enough largely in agreement on the core selection - but we harbour somewhat different opinions on some of the marginals.

I’ve tried to view these as being category leading first-choice pedals - at least at the time of their introduction / key active period. Meaning that the TC Electronic option ...