Riff Lord Mikey Demus of Skindred fame and Adrian Thorpe of ThorpyFX have collaborated for nigh on 7 years now on the Red Beard Effects project - but all good things must come to an end eventually - and that time is now! Mikey has become a proper chart-topping Rockstar with a #1 Album (You Got It!) and massive European and Australian tour in progress. Pedal Brands need a lot of time and effort invested in them - particularly on the promotional side of things, and Mikey just doesn’t have time ...

This is my second iStingor pedal - I’m fully onboard with that brand now, while the first one - the Super OverDrive OD-1 was entirely off my own back. I’ve been really impressed with this range - and there’s no one close to this level of quality at this price point - just $79 across the board courtesy of the iStingor Amazon.com Store. I’ve already commented on the build quality, and the exceptional packaging the pedals come in.

Note that my recently landed Metal Shredder MS-1 and Super Lead...

A super busy month - with plenty of highlights and heatwaves.

My house is finally cooling down as I write these last few observations - we’ve had around 10 days of oppressive heat now, and there’s another wave on the way at the end of this week - which makes for very difficult conditions to have sessions with said pedals.

We’re in the final consequence of global climate change now - with increasingly more extreme weather patterns occurring - alternately cold snaps, heatwaves, and torrential ...

It’s thanks to Leon Todd that I’m onto this intriguing new brand Sonisfact. They do have their own fairly minimal website, but no direct sales currently that I can see.

There are a handful of active dealers currently including Thailand’s CT Music - which I’ve referenced here, also Taiwan’s MOMO, and a couple of others I can’t properly access. AI tells me that you can buy direct from the Sonisfact site too, but I’m not seeing anything there - just 2 contact emails - info@sonisfact.com and ...

At one stage there was a 50/50 chance as to whether I would make the show - as there were significant disruptions on the Liverpool Street to Norwich line - which meant a bus replacement service between Colchester and Ipswich. Some of the journey times quoted were up to 4 and a 1/2 hours each way! In the end the door-to-door was closer to 3 hours in total! The journey up including the coach was actually more fun that the journey back via Cambridge. Cambridge has obviously sinned grievously as ...

Back in December of last year EarthQuaker released a special KGR Iron Foundry Edition of the HalfLife - which was limited to just 200 units, and priced at $350. You could only buy it direct from the Sunn Webstore - said release occurred when I was already in Iceland for my Christmas vacation - so there was no way I was going to get in on one of those. I had long predicted that we would eventually get a compact edition - which has now officially happened for general release!

This is actually...

Obviously all the PowerBolt Series pedals ship with stock orange knobs - but since I have so many pedals - I need to be able to easily identify what is what - and so I’ve replaced each of those orange knobs with pertinent unique colour replacement knobs.

When The PowerBolt Series launched last year - I bought 4 sets of knobs from Love My Switches. I used the Dark and Light Blue ones on the PowerTrem and PowerVibe pedals last year, and the remaining Purple and Hot Pink / Violet were perfect ...

By cool evolution we mean a DOD Grunge Distortion mixed with a DS-2 style gain stage instead of the Opamp, you get a tweaked EQ and a higher clipping threshold!

The Druzhkivka Grunge is Vitalii’s heavily modified homage to the infamous 90’s DOD FX69. He’s taken this classic high-gain distortion and radically evolved it for modern pedalboards, starting with a completely redesigned gain stage that utilizes a discrete op-amp architecture — similar to the beloved DS-2 — for a more dynamic and ...

The Gain Box was very evidently designed for the 4 Channels / Voices to be stacked, each individual voice isn’t particularly strong on its own, but gains significant potency when combined with one or two or all of the others.

I would really have preferred a little more output volume, and probably a Tilt EQ vs the current LPF style Filter for more overall oomph! I started with all dials at Noon, and then added or subtracted as appropriate - adding Presets and Combinations as I progressed ...