One of GPX’s loyal readers - one Richard K - suggested that I do a feature on Pedal Brands that were mostly or principally active on Etsy.com. I’ve always found the Etsy site somewhat problematic to use - there are scant details listed for those products / pedals etc., the layout and navigation are just horrendous, and the site search the worst of any I have encountered - where it just could not recall specific brands and pedals searched for - I needed to search via Google to get properly into ...

In the wake of the recent Wampler one I did - it made sense to do a roundup of my Keeley pedals too - which funnily enough numbers a very similar amount of pedals.

I obviously juggle a lot of different priorities across something like 400 brands - so unless I was a millionaire - which I most certainly am not - I have to share the love across all those different brands - with a ’sample’ in effect from each range.

Seemingly only Josh Scott appears to be in a position to have one of each ...

So in the wake of my ’9 Notable Brazilian Guitar Pedal Brands’ article I had a lot of people contacting me (as intended!) to tell me I’d overlooked this and that brand. The first mentioned was obviously Cachalote Audio which I liked so much that I did a separate article on that.

While altogether we had another 9 notable brands suggested - to include in this separate feature. In fact there are even more - including StarDust Electronic Art - where I’m waiting until I get enough suggestions to...

Brazil is a fascinating guitar pedal marketplace - mostly inward looking, and mostly closed off from the rest of the world. I was the first European I believe to get Aura Amps and Tone Ink pedals shipped out of Brazil. Some of those brands have some experience of shipping up the landmass and into Central and North America, but little or nothing ventures across the waters in either direction.

Andy Timmons has long favoured the GNI/ NIG Music OctaFuzz (as pictured left of centre) - where I’ve...

So I’ve been meaning to do this article for a while, but kept putting it off - in the hope that we might see more brands materialising from this country. That has not been the case though - so now seems as good a time as any to focus on the small but mighty trifecta of Croatian brands - Dawner Prince Electronics, DryBell Musical Electronic Laboratory and Polarbear Effects.

I typically have a grid of a 9 for this style of article - so here I’ve selected my favourite 3 choices from each brand...

WARNING! This post is massive, and will probably crash your mobile device! Best accessed via Desktop or Laptop!

Last time I did this exercise I featured just 9 companies in my cover shot, and covered 57 overall - with just videos for the top 9.

While this time around I’ve doubled down - where there are 27 companies in the cover shot and 105 overall! And circa half of those are accompanied by a video - which is a lot! I first cover the 27 Leading Lights group, and then the 78 brands in ...

This article was originally suggested by my now good friend Henry Kaiser - leading guitar and guitar effects experimentalist and prolific producer and recording artist. He’s been a long-term friend of Toshihiko Tanabe - of Tanabe.TV fame and thought I should do one of my pedal roundups on Japanese Boutique Pedal Builders.

I had long intended to do a feature on Japanese Pedal Makers - but could not decide on the context or format - as there are so many notable brands. Upon Henry’s suggestion...

This is the 11th in the Pedal Builders Country Series as such, although I’ve had to cast the net slightly wider as I currently don’t consider there to be enough top-tier / International-level builders in a single country here to satisfy the usual criteria. Brazil and Argentina come fairly close - with Brazil having significantly the most concentrated volume of builders of any Country in that part of the world. Generally Brazil, Argentina and Chile are particularly well represented.

I used 4...

Poland was both trickier and yet eventually easier to rationalise than originally perceived. I have scanned through many a country now, and Poland seems to be the last of those with sufficient numbers of high calibre pedal builders to warrant a dedicated feature*. As noted before - these sorts of article take quite a lot of work to complete - and so this is the last of these I will be doing for a while.

* Note that USA and Japan are the leading pedal builders of the world still and too ...