Obviously the big Distortion story of the year for me was my recent Full Metal Racket High Gain Distortion roundup - and roughly one third of this selection was in service of that feature alone. Even then I didn’t get to everything I wanted to as a couple or so builders weren’t particularly responsive. This is often quite a thankless task of revolving and closing doors - in any case case I’m proud of what I managed to accomplish regardless - and some of the candidates are quite superb.
The ...
This article has been such a long time coming - I last did a compact high gain distortion pedal roundup all the way back in 2019 - where only 24 featured. This time around I was determined to have it as comprehensive as possible, and like the recent 32 Overdrive and 32 Mini Fuzz selections - I was determined to have all in my reference collection.
I’ve long been a fan of heavier / metal textures and tones, and have always had certain pedal-chain slots dedicated to high gain pedals - in ...
As you can see from the flurry of activity during the last week of the month in particular - April has seen the culmination of 3 very significant projects - which is mostly reflected by the end-of-month Pedal-Chain snapshot.
It was not as if I was short of an overdrive or two, having around 150+ to-date to choose from, but I always felt I was missing a few classics, and in the last couple of months in particular - I made a real concerted effort to make my reference collection fully ...
I’ve long been a fan of Father and Son / family run Guitar and Effects Boutique Aleks K Production. Where Aleks and Nazar Kovalevskyy make some of the very finest quality small batch, hand-made guitars and pedals. All original and distinct from everything else that is out there!
I did an Aleks K range overview back in August of 2019, where I had already acquired the Maple Leaf Royal Drive Distortion and Red Scorpion 2 Mega Distortion. I later added the equally excellent Honey Moon 2 Sweet ...
I’m possibly writing this just a touch prematurely as at the point of writing - one of the pictured pedals hasn’t turned up quite yet, and it will be touch and go if gets released out of customs before the end of the year. That pedal being Sinvertek’s new N5+ Drive - featuring no less than 7 beautifully milled aluminium knobs along with 5 toggle-switches - and all within a compact enclosure format - but more of that later.
This year has mostly sort of gone to plan - but there are really too...
So I thought I would combine the Mini Pedal selection with the final overall category roundup featuring my current favourites and forthcoming/future acquisition targets. The above visual may be somewhat convoluted, but it well illustrates the trade off in footprint and practicality/utility you get across the different enclosure form factors.
I’ve stated before that I’ve largely moved away from the larger styles of enclosures in favour of more pedals of a more compact nature - which means ...
This is an update to the feature I wrote back in March of this year. I now have more of this selection in my collection - 18 of these 24, and there are 3 pedals that are new to this updated roundup - the Airis Effects Nemesis PreAmp, Blackhawk Amplifiers Balrog Distortion V3, and of course the Redbeard Effects Red Mist MKIV.
The 6 here that I’ve yet to acquire for my collection but which are of course all on the wishlist are the aforementioned Airis Effects Nemesis PreAmp and ...
When I did my recent Aleks K Production Range Overview I had obviously had my 2 favourite Aleks K pedals in the chain for a while - the Maple Leaf Royal Drive/Distortion and Red Scorpion 2 Mega Distortion. I noted how there was a sort of shared family tonal character between the pedals - with a pervasive smooth, long-sustaining musicality with a definite hint of compression.
I reaffirmed my choices as to which were my favourites and why, and indicated I would like to add the Honey Moon...
This post was sparked off by the recent launch of the Magnetic Effects Zig Zag Dual Stage Overdrive, my relatively recent acquisition of the Aleks K Production Maple Leaf Royal Drive and ThorpyFX Heavy Water Dual Boost pedals, and the hopefully fairly imminent arrival of my on-order Loophole Pedals Grey Matter Overdrive. They got me thinking about other pedals of this type which allow you to blend 2 separate circuits together essentially for more versatility and more complex and richer tones. ...
My first encounter with Aleks K Production was courtesy of a Brett Kingman demo of the Maple Leaf Royal Overdrive around a year and a half ago. I’m a fan of Brett’s and he’s one of my regular favourite resources for new pedal demos alongside many other guitar luminaries. Once I had checked out his 2 demos of the Maple Leaf, I next viewed the Red Scorpion 2 Mega Distortion, then the Hot Ice Sweet Distortion, Honey Moon 2 Sweet Overdrive and Sun Beam Magic Drive.
After the Brett overview I ...