It seems a long while since I first met the new owners of Mad Professor the Iconic Finnish Pedal Brands - Jussa and Mikko - at the London Synth and Pedal Expo back in March - where they announced their new MK2 Simble. They were sort of queuing up the pre-sales for that pedal - which started a week or two later, but it took quite the while for it to be officially launched and in stock.

I’ve been a big fan of Mad Professor pretty much from the start - especially as it’s somewhat connected to ...

So I’ve been waiting for my much delayed Keeley Manis to land (#17 overall) - to complete the series - and that happened on the day I’m writing this piece - which will be ’yesterday’ by the time it goes live. I ordered mine from Andertons on the 25th June - but it was delayed coming into stock at least twice, and then delayed on the shipping - so it’s been a series of scheduling issues supposedly.

I’m not sure what the root cause is - but the formerly pretty solid Andertons ’coming into ...

I’ve been meaning to cover these KGR Harmony pedals for a while - since I first saw them on the Coast Sonic newsletter. If I recall correctly EarthQuaker Devices did some custom limited editions of its Plumes and Blumes Overdrive Pedals - in collaboration with the same KGR Harmony! I just can’t recall which of those mailers I saw first.

In any case these pedals are hand-made using traditional Japanese techniques including  Nanbu-tekki. and utilising a proper iron foundry to make those very ...

So the original editions of these have a black enclosure with a colour accent graphic, and matching colour knobs. Where here those accent colours saturate the entire enclosure and the accent colours and knobs are black - a sort of inversion really.

I’m not sure I would feel the need to buy the whole set again in this new livery - albeit I really like these new editions. Which of course include the : 

• Noble Screamer
• Blues Disorder
• Super Rodent
• Angry Orange
• MK3 Driver

I’ve covered ...

Following last week’s Distortion-ology I obviously had to do the same exercise for Boss’s OverDrives.

This one was a little trickier to figure out an ideal arrangement - where I finally decided to group all the yellow ones together - and then sort of book-end those with the different colour variants.

This arrangement is based on Boss’s own definitions of ’OverDrives’ - and thus includes the Power Driver also - which I would rather classify as a Fuzz / Distortion - being that it’s Big ...

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 there are 8 pedals featured here, while I own those mini pedals in the top row in duplicate - with both original unadulterated editions  and the Alchemy Audio Modded ones featured (with dip-switches externalised as toggles) - so in truth I own 11 Xotic pedals overall!

The second key fact here is that most of the overdrives here are derived from the original AC Booster circuit - Xotic’s original Smooh Overdrive - now in expanded V2 edition (It apparently gets its moniker from the Vox AC30...

33 slots updated this year - #2, #3, #4, #5, #7, #9a, #9b, #10, #11, #12, #15a, #15b, #15c, #16, #17, #18, #19, #20, #22a, #22b, #23, #24, #25, #26, #29, #30, #31, #32, #33, #34, #36, #38, and #41.

There’s been a fair amount of re-routing and re-organising this year - which you should be able to pick via the pattern of changes. The introduction of the stereo Poly Amplitude introduced the biggest change to the board order - to get th most out of that format!

I try to limit acquisitions /...

It’s that time of year when I pick out my personal favourite pedals in each category - starting with the Boost and Overdrive ones. I weigh up each candidate on the basis of my own experiences, preferences and sensibilities - and include pedals also that I intended to get but did not quite yet around to acquiring during the year of release!

For this selection I personally own all but these 8 :

• Aleks K Production Honey Moon Sweet Overdrive V3
• Bleak District Slate Discrete Gemanium