Following on from my recent piece on Steve Mac’s Pedalboard - I was intrigued enough by the Pete Cornish contingent within that to do further research in line with my own idiosyncrasies and preferences. I’ve noted previously that I somewhat dismissed Pete Cornish’s pedals as being something of an over-sized, over-priced 70’s anachronism (my sincerest apologies!). Referring largely then to the original tour-grade Grey Pro Series which festooned many a guitar legend’...

In the wake of my ’6 Key Pedal Trends’ article from the start of the year - I talked up the likelihood of more parallel routing / stacking pedals following-on from the exceptional dual-channel GFI Synesthesia Multi-Modulator which emerged shortly before Christmas last year.

However, and not entirely because of Covid-19, there has been little to no action in that area this year. My introduction to parallel-routing pedals I believe was back around May 2017 with the Strymon ...

I would like to start by thanking Matt Knight and Joe Branton of Guitar Nerds who made this all possible and put me in contact with Steve Mac - guitarist and original member of the Australian Pink Floyd. This all stems back to the Guitar Nerds’ podcast for Friday 3rd July - an interview with Steve Mac, and the accompanying social media pictures of Steve’s home studio pedalboard - or literally ’wall of sound’.

I’m a considerable Floyd and Gilmour fan and ...

I have often cited the Ditto Mini Looper as TC Electronic’s key product - and most likely top sales champion over these years - as pretty much everyone I know has one. It has had to withstand an onslaught of almost identical copycat products at a fraction of its price - so it’s understandable that TCE felt they needed to do something to reestablish their leadership credentials in this area.

I’m obviously far from the first to cover this as I have a publishing ...

Readers of this blog should be well aware by now of Skindred’s Lead Guitarist and Redbeard Effects Head Honcho Mikey Demus. And while I had been very familiar with his band Skindred for a number of years - my focus didn’t shift fully to Mikey himself until he got into partnership with Adrian Thorpe and started producing his own range of signature pedals.

The first release was an exceptional take on Mikey’s core signature Orange Rockerverb 100 Amp sound - the Red Mist ...

So today’s big Strymon announcement sees the re-introduction of their Compressor + Boost pedal not long after the announced retirement of the now discontinued ’OB.1’. Admittedly there is significantly more to the added bells and whistles of the Compadre. You have a classic Analog VCA Compressor and Analog JFET input stage for the boost, with a digital control layer to save presets for MIDI and switching pedal purposes. The Compressor gets a Dry / Parallel Compression Mix and ...

So I seem to have fallen into something of a Josh Smith ToneQuest phase of late. I’ve always been a fan of his core signature tone/s while not necessarily the biggest fan of his musical output per se. His first influence on me was his signature Eventide H9 Rotary preset - which settings I share in this post. I have somewhat fallen into using my own H9 mostly in Josh’s Rotary mode - with a few choice reverbs and delays too, but modulations generally coming from other parts of my ...

I’ve encountered a number of ’Best Compressor’ articles this year which I really felt were not fully representative of the very best of what is out there. That was the catalyst for this feature, along with a couple of new compressors I had not properly featured yet, and the fact that I’ve not done a Compressor round-up for a good couple of years now.

Pretty much all the compressors listed here are / were already known to me, while I picked up a few new ones ...

I recently featured the Dr Scientist Dusk and stated that I was pretty much 90% sure that it was the right filter pedal to be rotated in on my current Micro-Tron III slot. I’ve seen quite a few videos on the Flower Pedals Hosta Wah Filter too, and a couple of other examples which are sort of niggling at me as to whether I’m fully properly informed. Ever being the one to make sure that I do the appropriate amount of due diligence in the process of selecting the ideal pedal for me, I ...

We’ve been waiting for the full reveal on this one for a while as the first teaser image for this was Insta’d on the 14th of September last year. There were some expectations that this might feature at Winter NAMM, but it seems it’s only now fully formed.

What we have here then is all of TC Electronic’s TonePrint-enabled pedals in a single unit and available across 5 any way configurable slots. This means you get all the different variations of effects from the ...