February can often seem a rather odd month after the hustle and bustle of NAMM Show January - where a lot of new stuff always gets announced - while increasingly outside the NAMM schedule - but certainly in and around it! Projects delayed from the previous year often get released in January, but this year those kind of seem to be more spaced out - with some not feted to happen until March / April. February always seems slow compared to January, and that sometimes extends into March too before ...

It seems a long while ago now since I reviewed the V1 The Jack and The Kraken - respectively November 14th, and 21st of 2022. I had intended to tackle the remaining 3 Victory V1 pedals - The Copper, The Sheriff and The Duchess - not too long after that - but all kinds of other happenstances and priorities got in the way. So it seems a timely exercise to revisit the Victory V1 Series - which was / is a close collaboration between my good friend Adrian Thorpe and Victory Amps’ Martin Kidd.

It...

The final arrangement for the year - all the pedals that impressed the most!

So right at the end of last month Rob Chapman posted up a YouTube video of a rundown of his all-time favourite guitar pedals. He initially states he’s going to name his 10 most favoured ones - but goes on to mention 20 - which I’ve fully included here.

Rob has a great ear for tone - as countless of his own and Anderton’s videos have proven time and time again. And I really love his everyman approach to guitar gear. I’ve encountered him in person 2 or 3 times now over the years - and he’s ...

Vox’s Valvenergy pedals are just a handful of pedals that are currently using parent company Korg’s NuTube microtube technology - which first appeared in the now discontinued Ibanez NTS NU Tube Screamer. I always thought there was something slightly soft about the output of the NuTube - and I was never really taken by the NU Tube Screamer compared to the classic TS808 and TS9 varieties.

I went into this exercise with an open mind - following on from my recent ’Brian and Eddie’ article. ...

So in my recent ’Guitar Elements’ series it’s finally come to Amps now - where I list out what I believe are the most historically significant and therefore Iconic amps. A lot of you are still conflating Iconic with Vintage, and discounting some of the more recent models - while Iconic does not necessarily infer a long term history and provenance - just that said item or element is a major marker or step forward in the evolution of that device - whatever it may be.

I’m not the first to do ...

Readers of this blog will know that I’ve long and consistently had 2 key pedal types in my pedal-chain - namely a Brian May Vox style pedal, and an Eddie Van Halen Marshall Plexi style pedal - which for the last number of years have populated slots #17 and #18.

My very first pairing was the hybrid set of Bearfoot FX EGDM and MI Effects Super Crunch Box V2 - which overall probably served the longest innings on those two slots.

Since that first pairing we’ve had matched brand pairs - from...

There’s never a dull moment, and rarely a span of time without a ripple or wrinkle. I don’t get many frustrating or disastrous days - while this last Friday was particularly eventful as I wrestled with 4 challenges simultaneously. One of my new pedals was detective and simply didn’t work - but I spent half a day trying to get something out of it - different positions on the board, different cabling, power-supply solutions and every tiny attempt to correct the obvious deficiency. At the same ...

It’s been a while since I last did a Vox-in-a-box roundup - in fact all the way back to my 2018 12 of the Best Vox Style Pedals feature - so it was about time I did an update. Readers will know that I always have a Vox pedal in my pedal-chain - occupying what is now slot #17.

It started with the Catalinbread Galileo way back when - and then following this rough sequence :

1. Catalinbread Galileo
2. Bearfoot FX Emerald Green Distortion Machine Silver (Silicon) - longest raining to-date