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 ...

There are numerous Drum Machine style pedals out there - where you select from banks of rhythms and drum-kits - with various alternative variations, fills and changes in pattern. Dedalo though has gone back to the sort of Linn prototypes where you actually tap in your own rhythm - bass drum, snare drum, hi-hats / rides etc. Which you then save to memory as presets.

This pedal is brand new to NAMM, and there are not a lot of details on it yet - and thus far just the Delicious Audio Demo...

Our pal Alexandre Ernandez and his team at Anasounds have come up with 3 very complementary pedals this year - all featuring some truly smart and elegant innovations and configured around the Tremolo effect. The flagship here has to be the Ages Analog Harmonic Tremolo - which has 5 controls alongside a second Tap-Tempo footswitch :

• Out (Volume)
• Depth
• Tone
• Tap-Divisions - 2/1, 4/4, 1/2, 1/3
• 2-way Rate/Depth Attack Follower switch

This is a highly dynamic Tremolo which is designed to ...

Catalinbread’s new pedals for NAMM are a highly versatile / tweakable fuzz and sort of mini version of the Belle Epoch Pre. The Giygas Fuzz benefits from Tilt EQ, Mids, Dry Blend, Loud (Volume) and Fuzz Settings - where the EQ and Mids dials are both centre-detented on 900Hz for suitable strident and cutting / aggressive fuzz. The Blend control helps temper the Fuzz and bring in some of the Dry signal for ambience or damping impact - all in all a great-sounding extended-range fuzz. The ...

My own story with Sitek pedals can be traced back to a fortuitous YouTube demo by Joss Allen (April this year) of the then pretty brand spanking new Pandora Fuzz. Everyone knows I’m a huge fuzz fan by now - and I really liked what I heard and what I saw - pretty much within the first couple of minutes of playback - I was straight onto Reverb.com where Sitek has a store - and the pedal was with me within a matter of days. The Pandora being Andrzej ’Andy’ Sitek’s evolved ...

This is my 3rd re-write from scratch of this article - I keep coming across new details! This was initially inspired by the arrival of Mooer’s E7 series - first represented by the Tone Capture GTR, and now by the very recent 7-Mode/7-Presets E7 Synth pedal which continues that distinctive new enclosure format - which is in someways an evolution from Mooer’s Micro-PreAmps - with the same 5 mini knobs and push-button topology, but here accompanied by 7 Mode/Preset LEDs positioned down...

Josh Scott’s newest pedal draws from the changes made to the Eurorack 500 Series variant of this essentially signal conditioner and EQ box - based on the classic studio channel-strip. The original pedal was inspired by the beautifully warm-sounding mid-1960’s analogue pro studio mixing consoles designed by Rupert Neve (80 Series). A key magic ingredient of those mixing desks were the Neve-designed audio output transformers which here are represented by the equally stellar Lundahl ...

I’ve been following the development of this pedal since Robert first announced it back at Winter NAMM 2018 - although I believe that was somewhat of a dummy box as the development of the DSP was still pretty early days. In the intervening near two year period quite a lot has changed - while from a distance things look fairly similar. The core mission is still the same where this is principally a simulated Tape Modulated Delay with processing on the repeats / delay trails and combining ...

One of the areas I have yet to get properly stuck into is making recordings from my Stereo Rig - up until now I had been planning on some sort of 3 Mic setup with one per Cab, and an ambient Room Mic. This approach would have involved all manner of additional hardware boxes and cabling, signal-fine-tuning, re-balancing and mix down, and while there are a couple or so decent Stereo Amp/Cab Simulators already on the market - nothing has held any appeal for me until now.

Strymon in their ...