Christos Ntaifotis’ CTC Limelight is somewhat overshadowed by its rather more celebrated Constellation Fuzz siblings (as recently featured on this site), while in several ways it offers a little bit more courtesy of its smartly calibrated 3rd Beam / Bias control. The Limelight is a slightly different circuit to the core of the Constellation, while it uses those same NOS Philips OC41 Black Glass Transistors as are featured in the current version of the Constellation.

I’ve ...

April has been another pretty formidable month - and at last I have the CopperSound Triplegraph in my hands - which presented some challenges in being accommodated within the rig. I’ve had to significantly adjust and rejig various elements and areas - including of course the format of the above reference visual.

This indicates the physical position of the Triplegraph at position #14 in terms of physical pedal placement - where it sits just before the CBA Automatone Preamp, while ...

As you may have guessed from the visual - I am now in possession of all 3 varieties of CTC Constellation - the original OC45 variety, latest Limited Edition CV7003 (OC44) variety (some of those still available if you’re super quick), and current generally available OC41 variety. Crazy Tube Circuits main man Christos Ntaifotis knew of my predilection for set completion, and very graciously supplied the missing piece - or the OC41 edition, in order to round up this compact collection. All 3...

With the fairly imminent arrival of the 3,000 limited-run edition Boss TB-2W Germanium Tone Bender MKII, I thought it opportune to do a brief potted history of Boss’s compact fuzz pedals. Note that according to latest updates, the wholly sold out TB-2W pedals will not be going out until late May now. This is a little later than the Late April/Early May date range that was the originally advertised. Each of those pedals requires separate hand-calibration and setup with extensive testing ...

March seems to have been unusually busy on all sides really, particularly with the day-job’s annual keynote event. Generally this year has been off to quite a moderate start, but that seems to have accelerated somewhat during this month.

It’s been a mixture of January NAMM pedals materialising and spring-time special offers, all of which contributed to a somewhat bumper month - with a record-breaking for me 29 acquisitions, prior to that the record stood at 26, while that ...

I acquired my original Blue OC45 Constellation pretty much as soon as it was announced - or back in April of 2018, and it was a mainstay of my pedal-chain for several months in a row then, and still puts in a fairly regular appearance / rotation nowadays. It was probably due another rotation right about now - so it’s handy to reminisce on its prowess versus the new limited edition CV7003 variety - which uses that slightly rarer transistor type, and where only 200 will be made.

By...

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...

In something of a departure from the norm, and for this particular feature - I’ve decided to use largely Boss’s excellent original words for today’s announcement.

The key points being that as of 8am today - Thursday 4th of February - the much anticipated TB-2W essentially goes on sale as of the moment - in terms of Preorders. Most of the big Boss dealers will have stock allocations that you can preorder against - undoubtedly including Andertons, Sweetwater and Thomann...

And so it begins again! This time punctuated by Virtual NAMM / Believe in Music Week and some certain JA incident.

I will include a mini NAMM roundup here of what some of my favourites were. In the past I’ve done a separate highlights article on the subject - but there really weren’t that many releases this time around to warrant such - in fact I would estimate only around 10% of the volume released in 2020 and 2019.

I will also indicate where I think I’m ...

It is with a heavy heart I report that this will be the last Jackson Audio feature I include on this site. I had intended doing a full in-depth review of the unit and all 6 Plugin Modules. And in pursuit of such I tried to request some degree of accommodation / discount to help make this happen. After all $480 / £480 all in is a very significant outlay, and Guitar Pedal X is entirely self-funded. It’s quite normal in this industry to engage in a fair and equitable value exchange - ...