And here we have the GRAND FINAL- with all 36 Award Winners from the Group Stages - across all 5 categories!

The first two places have kind of been obvious for a while, where the 3rd / BRONZE position was actually the hardest to decide on - it was between the eventual recipient - the Tubesteader Gainlord, Boss’s XS-100 Poly Shifter, Blue FX Devices Fuzz Fields and Gamechanger’s Motor Synth - all of whom would have been worthy runners-up - while in the end I went for the one that overall ...

And so onto the Distortions of the year - the smallest group stage this year! There’s no particular logic as to why there are just 20 Disortions this year. There were a further couple of acquisitions that I was disappointed with - and I deliberately left out of this selection. It’s mostly a case of what appeals each year - and evidently there weren’t that many appealing ones beyond those I acquired. I’m not aware of any particular ones that are still in the wind. The last one in was the ...

October was a super busy month - one of the busiest ever - with such a scope and scale and body of work covered - I’m quite shattered as a result!

We had of the penultimate Events of the year :

• The 2nd Woking Boutique Guitar Show
• Kempton Park London International Guitar Show

And around one dozen key posts  as below also :

• Letter from Dr.No
• Teaching Machines FuzzBillion Component Combinations Wheels Gain-Shaper
• Hangman fx DAGG’R Dynamic Auto-Gain/Gate Mighty Morphing Gain-Ramper

This is my first Blue Colander pedal - which is an instant top-tier hit for me - being one of my all-time favourite extended range Rat Distortions - it sounds really phenomenal in so many different ways.

The first stage core OpAmp is the current most popular one for contemporary Rats - the OP07, while the secondary More stage consists of an LM386 OpAmp

The core Rat consists of Volume, High, Low and Distortion controls - with added Limit Hard Clipping, and Comp Soft Clipping Silicon / ...

So this recently issued Grimrobe is destined to be my very first Blue Colander pedal - I love everything about it - including its versatile and crushing output. The control topology is super smart - and really delivers an incredibly broad palette of Distoriton and Fuzz tones. I’m just waiting for my good friend Joe Light @ Joe’s Pedals to get these in stock - so I can pounce. Thanks also to the TGR Podcast for flagging this one for me - as it had managed to evade my scrutiny! While it was only ...

My readers will know that I’ve featured Joe’s Pedals a fair few number of times on this site - in reference to where I acquired several of my own pedals from. My first introduction to said boutique was in search of Marc Ahlfs’ Skreddy Pedals. In fact 5 of my 8 Skreddy’s have come from Joe’s and I would have gotten more had those been in stock when I needed them - such is always the luck of the draw with pedal acquisitions - in that you cannot always get everything you want from the one source. ...