We’re steadily seeing the Boss 20-Series pedals being replaced now, and the VE-20 is the latest to get a very significant upgrade. The new VE-22 moves things on pretty massively and completely revamps and enhances the form factor, switches, knobs and overall control interface - with 3 core switches now in place of the former 2 - and really smart dedicated controls for each of the core functions - all served by a highly visibly and usable LED screen.
If you’re a singer or vocal performer of ...
The final arrangement for the year - all the pedals that impressed the most!
So we featured 120 pedals across the 5 Genre categories this year - as you’ve witnessed over the last 5 days, and those have been whittled and distilled down to these 27 Magnificent and Exceedingly Flavoursome candidates.
Picking out the very best of those is obviously a slightly subjective exercise while based on a series of exacting criteria - including innovation, versatility, practicality, variability, playability, quality of manufacture, quality of output and sheer enjoyment.
Here ...
The Modutility roundup combines Modulation, Utility and Pitch type pedals - it also includes Multi-FX and Multi-Modulation pedals of course. Some years this selection is relatively sparse - while this year it’s totally chock-a-block! In fact it was a struggle to whittle the Longlist down - and inevitably some pedals I wanted to feature did not make the cut - including the Endorphin.es Ghost Pedal Multi-FX and Subdecay Prometheus 3 Dual Super Filter.
I still feel that this selection of 26 is...
Joel obviously dropped a number of clues as to what Chase Bliss’s new pedal would be - and most guessed it was some kind of Lo-Fi / Fidelity Reducing - Filter / Compressor / Bitcrusher type of thing. While typically ’Bitcrushing’ is associated with the extreme 8bit style of effect which typically creates harder, harsher and more brittle artefacts - while the Lossy is a much more expansive, refined and nuanced affair.
Goodhertz describe their own source Lossy Plugin as the "infinitely ...
When I first started doing the visual for this I thought I had amassed 10 Beetronics pedals to date - but it turns I’m one short of that milestone - it still kind of made sense to mark the occasion of the Custom Shop Nectar’s arrival - which is probably my favourite Custom Shop edition to date. I had to wade through 3 batches to pick out that one - I wanted metal knobs - and a pinkish hue to the core - and the one pictured really captured my imagination. I quite liked my SeaBee at the time of ...
This is one pedal you definitely need to dip into the manual to understand fully what’s going on - while the Hologram Electronics engineers have imbued this device with so much intuitive smarts that you should be up and running in no time.
This pedal is a shoe-in for the Eventide H90 on my #35 slot while they’re quite different beasts really - and the H90 gets you more granular in some ways - with many more algorithms precisely modelled - while you can only deploy two in combination. While ...
One of my readers alerted me to this pedal quite a while back, but it was a little too far away then, and with not enough final details on the pedal yet to really pique my interest - while when I see it now in all its final glory - it seems to me to be the most obvious pedal to stand in for my Hologram Microcosm on slot #39 - and I am therefore very interested in acquiring one for just such a purpose.
It’s of course a magnificent Multi-FX pedal - in fact here labeled a ’Multi-Dimensional ...
I’ve been meaning to do this article ever since the Witney Pedal Party event - where we lucky few who attended - were spellbound by some David Rainger magic - courtesy of a sort of combination performance and demo piece which mostly made use of the above 3 core pedals but in fact included every pedal in the range at some stage.
The Snare Trap and Drone Rainger have a real Dubby / SoundSystem dynamic to them - where in this context - this particular combination kind of renders as a sort of 3...
These are just different enclosure artwork editions where all else is the same as for the standard editions - just the graphics are different. Note that my background visual here is very apt gold confetti!
Both limited edition anniversary pedals retail for the same standard price of $399 and equivalent in your local currency. Of course available for order right now from the Chase Bliss Webstore. Generally there is a 10% Anniversary discount on most pedals on the site - while some exceptions...