February can often seem a rather odd month after the hustle and bustle of NAMM Show January - where a lot of new stuff always gets announced - while increasingly outside the NAMM schedule - but certainly in and around it! Projects delayed from the previous year often get released in January, but this year those kind of seem to be more spaced out - with some not feted to happen until March / April. February always seems slow compared to January, and that sometimes extends into March too before ...
I’ve had my Rise & Shine for about a week - and it’s very evident that Luke Hilton and his team have pulled out every stop with this very unique Octave / Trem Fuzz. It’s most certainly full-fat-flavour on both the core Fuzz Voicing and Upper Octave Effect. And then it does some even more clever things in how it can further modulate that octave effect [Octapulse].
I’m going to start off with some of the trickier aspects of the pedal - not that anything here is particularly tricky - you ...
And so to what is often my favourite category - the many wonderful flavours of fuzz - and we have some hugely innovative pedals in the selection this year - one of these may even be my pedal of the year!
So there are 24 in this year’s selection - where I’m just missing the Collision Devices TARS, Fender Shields Blender, JAM Pedals Octaurus, KMA Machines Mandrake, Reeves Electro Facet IZ, and Unsound Circuitry Kato Glitch Fuzz - where I will attempt to add most of those to the reference ...
So the new Rise & Shine is quite the departure for Stone Deaf FX - and based on an entirely new compact platform - 3 years in the making - with Multi-Mode switches and special functions. Every aspect of this pedal is custom - from the hand in-filled recessed enamel facia, sand-blasted anodised custom aluminium enclosure, custom milled aluminium knobs, and custom optical + magnetic footswitches - with innovations in every area!
Owner Luke Hilton describes how much innovation went into ...
This post was prompted by the new Funny Little Boxes Skeleton Key Distortion - a follow-up to their hugely successful and popular 1991 Pearl Jam style Dual Overdrive / Distortion. This marks the 3rd gain pedal to have been inspired in some way by Josh Homme’s signature sound - while in some ways this one goes even further than the previous two with its QOTSA tie-in. While to date I believe the only one that Josh has actually used in his rig - is some version of the Stone Deaf FX PDF Low Gain ...
WARNING! This post is massive, and will probably crash your mobile device! Best accessed via Desktop or Laptop!
Last time I did this exercise I featured just 9 companies in my cover shot, and covered 57 overall - with just videos for the top 9.
While this time around I’ve doubled down - where there are 27 companies in the cover shot and 105 overall! And circa half of those are accompanied by a video - which is a lot! I first cover the 27 Leading Lights group, and then the 78 brands in ...
SDFX is calling these ’Black’ editions - while it’s probably more correct to say ’Black & Red’. In any case each of these circuits has been refined and hones at the same time as this different graphics treatment - so that these are officially the best versions of these pedals to-date.
I’m very familiar with the Fig Fumb in particular - and it has long been on my wishlist - while I was hoping that Luke Hilton would shrink down these enclosure somewhat - more towards the Tremotron and ...
I’m a big dan of Stone Deaf FX pedals generally - while I really tend to favour their more compact enclosure editions - per the Tremotron and Syncopy pedals. So I was delighted to see that the QBoost is another compact variety of that ilk.
This is about as simple a pedal as there is - with just two knobs, and two footswitches. The left-knob and footswitch relate to the full-frequency Pre-Amp Boost / Push, while the high-hand knob and footswitch are for a frequency-focused Freq ...
This is the 4th of my recent ’12 Degrees’ Series - this time moving beyond the boundaries of gain / saturation into the area of modulation. There are of course many more than the 12 modulations I have selected here - there are aliasing, ring modulation and lo-fi signal degeneration effects as well as more complex multi-combo effects, splicers and complex pattern modulators - including for instance the excellent recent Big Ear Albie. Of course the more obscure the category of ...
My readers will know that I’ve featured Joe’s Pedals a fair few number of times on this site - in reference to where I acquired several of my own pedals from. My first introduction to said boutique was in search of Marc Ahlfs’ Skreddy Pedals. In fact 5 of my 8 Skreddy’s have come from Joe’s and I would have gotten more had those been in stock when I needed them - such is always the luck of the draw with pedal acquisitions - in that you cannot always get everything you want from the one source. ...