It is well known by now that I’m a considerable fan of fuzz, but I do have hangups about impractical over-sized and unergonomically formatted pedals. This means I really don’t have an affinity for any of those original Tone Bender enclosures and the like - which are pretty much as long and as practical as frogman’s flippers for footwear. When fuzz pedals first emerged they were the very first effects pedals taken into use - and players only ever had a few effects pedals on ...

Several people predicted that following on from the pricey $400 hand-wired 1966 Range - which I wasn’t entirely complementary about - that Josh Scott would release more mainstream SMD style devices covering the same sort of territory. In the launch video (per Final Thoughts below) Josh mentioned that there would likely be 10 pedals in this new series - with the above 4 being the first available. I expect the Legends of Fuzz Series to overlap very significantly with the 1966 Range ...

This is a somewhat belated follow-up to my Mini Pedals State of the Art article where I covered the new benchmarks in mini pedal engineering, quality and design. I’m actually really taken with mini pedals that use the highest quality components and construction, and ideally have classy milled-aluminium knobs as pictured!

For the longest time I’ve considered Guillem Vilademunt of Decibelics as the pinnacle of this particular craft. And it heartens me to see Dave Friesema ...

This is probably not the best time to be featuring a range of pedals whose average price is circa £379 equivalent (for the Compact varieties, and where the most expensive currently is the larger DJ1 Bass Overdrive/Distortion at £474). Yet this article follows on from my recent post on Josh Smith’s pedalboard - where of course I featured his most excellent Signature Vemuram Myriad Hybrid Fuzz.

I have had my eye on a few Vemuram pedals over the years, but have always ...

So I did my SGFX Compact Fuzz Range Overview back in January - where I featured my own 9 favourites past and present varieties. I stated then that I really should be looking at the larger pedals - and I’ve already determined a number of these to be acquisition-worthy - it’s just a matter of getting my other priorities and commitments out of the way first. The NAMM pedal releases have become a real waiting game now - and all pedal-makers are seemingly impacted in one way or another ...

This post was suggested by a reader - a friend of the person whom I acquired the ProAnalog Devices MKIV Modern from near the tail-end of last year and via Reverb.com. Instead of covering just the ProAnalog pair though, I decided I should cover 4 matched sets of mine which have some underlying similarities in many ways. In each instance I had acquired just one of each of these pairs, but so liked that one pedal that I decided later to get the matching pair. The largest gap in pair completion was...

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 ...

For me, this turned out to be the best The Guitar Show yet - where I pretty much managed to round off all my pre-show goals - in terms of seeing what and whom I wanted to / needed - as per the following highlights. I caught 2 great lunchtime showcases - first by Mikey Demus of Skindred / Redbeard Effects fame and then Rabea Massaad of Andertons, Chapman, Dorje, Toska, etc. fame - and D’Addario as it turned out - albeit people were really just there to see Bea play.

I must have ...

You should know by now that I’m a big fan of DanDrive Pedal - per my September 2019 overview of the brand. And of course I dearly love my Austin Pride (Germanium/Silicon Switching Texas Square Face Fuzz) and Secret Weapon (Zonk Fuzz) pedals from that overview.

To be honest I was a tad miffed when Dan introduced a third John Hornby Skewes Zonk variant - as I had only just recently then acquired the Secret Weapon edition. Dan’s original take on the JHS Zonk was the Germanium ...

A couple of provisos right from the start here - this is obviously not a definitive selection per se - it’s grounded to my own preferences - and secondly, as I’ve noted several times before - I’ve come rather late to EarthQuaker Devices and don’t have as many of those pedals in the collection as I probably should. I’ve mentioned on numerous occasions about the idiosyncrasies of how we are exposed to different gear. What each player is into is the result of quite ...