GPX Blog

I’ve already largely decided what new pedals I will be targeting this year (that I know of!) - following on from the various reveals and announcements made over the last week, and other projects I’m aware of and various themes I will be pursuing in 2020.

First of all to explain the above visual - this features and extrapolation of my current pedal-chain - with the NAMM legend in front of various new / newish pedals - Green means already acquired - or at least already ...

So despite the perilous state of the world, the first NAMM of the new decade actually turned out to be pretty stellar. I had thought that last year’s exceptional show might end up as the all-time high water mark - but this one turned out just as many pleasant surprises.

Slightly different to last year there were a more significant number of pedals announced and launched in advance of the show - while a lot of pedals at the show had very little by way of collateral and some are ...

Contrary to my original analysis - all 3 pedals are actually pretty well rounded and ready to go - while Jackson Audio want to give each a chance to reach their intended audience - meaning a staggered release - with the first to be made available being Joey Landreth’s signature Golden Boy Overdrive ($299) - pre-orders will be up any day soon with shipping due to start in February. The pedal gets its name from a statue which sits atop the Manitoba Legislative Building in Joey’s home ...

I caught some early preview snaps of these on Instagram - and have been waiting for a while for better resources to appear yet to no avail. In the end I had to make my own composites from the best reference I could find online as it does not appear Jackson Audio will be releasing proper details during the show. I was able to do decent facsimiles of the Modular Fuzz and Golden Boy - and will do the El Guapo Distortion image/overview separately / additionally later - as and when better references...

It seems like Crazy Tube Circuits have saved the best to last this year with a pretty special rendition of the 1962 Magnatone Custom 460 Vibrato amplifier. In essence pairing a dynamic JFET gain stage with a dual phase shift modulation - which really captures and takes you into those sort of vintage harmonic tremolo / whirling phaser / vibe sounds.

You get 8 controls on the pedal:
Volume (Gain) | Master Output | Depth | B/N/M Bright/Normal/Mellow | Wet/Dry-Wet | Bass | Treble | Speed

&...

When I started this roundup a few years ago, there were only 9 pedals in my selection, while this latest edition has 28 - which will likely be the maximum number I display here - I will just ongoingly swap in newer and more interesting pedals as and when I come across them - for future roundups.

I’ve long since singled out Fuzz Pedals as being particularly suitable for the mini format - and in fact my first long-term pedal-chain fuzz was the still excellent EWS Little Fuzzy Drive...

I’ve featured MXR quite a lot on this site over the years, but bizarrely and somewhat inexplicably to date have only acquired one of those numerous pedals - the Mini Phase 95, actually with the Brown Acid it makes 2! And this just after my fairly recent acquisition of the Pigdog Juju Fuzz - which also happens to be a TB MKIII style fuzz - I think I now have a nicely rounded quartet of MKIII’s with room for a couple more no doubt. Of course I’m an avowed fuzz fan, and I have ...

I’ve had my sights on the Analog.Man Astro Tone Fuzz and PigDog Mark III Juju Fuzz for a while now - both are made in small batches and in different colourways, and neither stays in stock for long - so you need to pounce when you see a suitable candidate available.

This last chapter of pedal acquisitions has been kind of serendipitous as shortly after I spotted and ordered a black edition Astro Tone, PigDog announced a new batch of 10 shiny black and gold Juju pedals. I had been ...

Yet another Pedal Primary Colour Wheel derived article - I must surely be running out of these colour-associated varieties soon. In my original piece I recalled the alliteration of Lovepedal’s Purple Plexi which made that the most obvious Purple Pedal association, yet I also mentioned how Jimi Hendrix had inspired a number of Purple Fuzz Pedals. This is as distinct from the Violet Ram’s Head Muff - which is associated with a slightly different hue. Here the colour Purple is that ...

Like many others I’m guessing, my first exposure to DanDrive Pedals was courtesy of Joey Landreth’s brief Secret Weapon Fuzz appearance on a relatively recent That Pedal Show Episode

I confess that I was not fully aware of Dan and his super high quality brand of Fuzz Pedals until that very moment - which is rare for such a Fuzz fan as me.

DanDrive Pedal Solution has actually only been established for a couple of years now - with the earliest official record being...