When I think of Oil Can Delays - I think of the Adineko by Catalinbread, the OBNE Black Fountain, and JHS 3 Series Oil Can Delay - and now we have a Strymon variant - the Olivera - as a new addition to Strymon’s compact series - where it joins the Brig dBucet Delay, and EC-1 Single Head dTape Echo on that roster.

I personally have yet to feel the need for an Oil Can Delay - I’ve used that on the occasional Multi-FX Pedal - and have never quite gelled with that voicing - I don’t mind it - ...

My Strymon journey started in December of 2016 - of course with the ’Stryfecta’ of BigSky, Mobius, and TimeLine. That was my first foray into Strymon, as well as the first of my Workstation pedal types - where I’ve favoured Stereo BIG-BOX solutions for Modulation, Delay and Reverb ever since. You can see the Stryfecta was a very significant part of my first official pedal-chain arrangement - first shared in April of 2017 - as below!

I own a fairly significant number of Reverb Pedals - where I’m mostly focused on Workstation style Pedals with multiple algorithms. I normally have at least 2 Reverbs on the board - a Primary Multi-Verb, and a Secondary more Specialist Verb. Occasionally I have a 3rd Reverb - which can be another Stereo Secondary, or more likely a Mono Tertiary. In fact I can have as many as 4 Reverbs on the board - as the Eventide H90 is always there too!

You can see from my various Pedal-Chain posts that ...

So I did a State of Power article back at the start of last year - where I identified that I really needed to update / upgrade a couple of my power supplies - my Friedman Power Grids - which were just a constant 10 x 350mA - all properly isolated, but not really up to some of the recent digital / hybrid pedals - which average out at 9V 500mA, and where the Tube Preamps typically take at least 9V 500, but more typically 12V @ 300mA+. The NUX Zeus supplies were the perfect replacements for the ...

I’m a huge fan of Tape Delays, but typically Multi-Head varieties - like say the Roland / Boss Space Echo. In some ways this completes the Volante / El Capistan / EC-1 arc - as each of those devices offers up fewer overall features. I’ve said that this is really a distillation of the El Capistan - where that one had 3 key modes of operation - Fixed / Multi / Single - and this EC-1 is just the Single mode from the El Capistan really - with some variations.

Controls - Time (50ms-1000ms) [Tap ...

It’s been a while since I did one of these colour roundups - per the below visual - all the way back in 2020 in fact. I’ve done quite a few of these over the years and there’s a whole Section dedicated to ’Colours’ on the ’Highlights’ Tab of this site.

Every time I do this exercise I try to be more thorough and expansive. Last time I identified 12 primaries, while this time around we have no less than 26 pedals across 20 categories - and I hint at several more - which means there are 6 ...

33 slots updated this year - #2, #3, #4, #5, #7, #9a, #9b, #10, #11, #12, #15a, #15b, #15c, #16, #17, #18, #19, #20, #22a, #22b, #23, #24, #25, #26, #29, #30, #31, #32, #33, #34, #36, #38, and #41.

There’s been a fair amount of re-routing and re-organising this year - which you should be able to pick via the pattern of changes. The introduction of the stereo Poly Amplitude introduced the biggest change to the board order - to get th most out of that format!

I try to limit acquisitions /...

So this is the big one - all the top performers from the year in one selection.

We’ve already covered :

• 35 Boost & Overdrive Pedal Finalists
• 34 Distortion Pedal Finalists
• 32 Fuzz Pedal Finalists
• 38 Modutility Pedal Finalists
• 25 Delay and Reverb Pedal Finalists

Total Overall Finalist Selection of 164 Pedals!

Distilled down to the final favourites selection, where I own 27 of them, and will try to secure the final missing ones next year :

• Coffee Shop Pedals London Fog Tape Delay -

I obviously just recently won me an AC Noises Ricorda Retro Series Reverb as a Chase Bliss Mystery Box Bonus Pedal - so the first iteration I had to make on this article was to update the standard Blue Ricorda image to the limited colourway edition that I was gifted by my Mystery Box. This selection is typically the one where I own the least proportion of pedals featured, in fact in this case it’s easier to list the few that I own here :

• AC Noices Ricorda Stereo Granular Reverb + Freeze /