Jon and Anna Ashely have done a wonderful job of entirely retooling their VCA style Compressor - now honed to perfection as the ideal always on compressor. Where its impact is wholly organically natural and non-colouring / extremely transparent in nature.

Its -96dBu noise floor is low enough that the Squish As can be used pretty much anywhere in the chain. And up to 20dB of makeup gain on the Output control and a tilt-style Tone control will ensure that nothing is lost along the way.

It...

The title here is just an odd confection to represent that the most significant additions to the chain this month were Choruses, Clones and Fuzzes. All-in-all a really special month - with my properly hooking up with hitherto correspondent pal Paulo De Gregorio - of Delicious Audio and Stompbox Exhibit fame. He was in London coordinating his first ever London Synth and Pedal Expo - and I was proud to be a Media Partner for that event. I feel Paulo and I are 2 of the biggest parts of the pedal ...

Jon and Anna Ashley’s most celebrate pedal is back once more - and this time it looks like I will finally get my hands on my own unit. Europeans trying to order one off the Bondi Effects website will be disappointed that the only delivery region options are Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Singapore and the United States.

Not to worry though as Bondi Effects are now part of the MAS Distro family and will therefore become available at MAS Distro dealers soon enough. Right now the current ...

It’s been a couple of years since I last did one of these particular genre roundups and this year has seen a number of new entrants into this category which really makes this worth visiting again right now. I’ve already done a feature on the larger dual-channel Bluesbreaker style pedals this year - KOT etc. While the Fredric Effects Blue Monarch, Jackson Audio Golden Boy and Siren Pedals Juneau are the newbies for 2020.

Moreover - the much loved Bondi Effects Del Mar has been reissued in ...

I’ve encountered a number of ’Best Compressor’ articles this year which I really felt were not fully representative of the very best of what is out there. That was the catalyst for this feature, along with a couple of new compressors I had not properly featured yet, and the fact that I’ve not done a Compressor round-up for a good couple of years now.

Pretty much all the compressors listed here are / were already known to me, while I picked up a few new ones along the way. I also came across...

Update! This feature inspired 7 further articles - Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Sky Blue and Purple.

This feature was inspired by a couple of different events - firstly ongoing conversations I have been having with Fjord Fuzz’s Daniel Thornhill about the colour of LEDs for different pedal types, and secondly an odd Q&A episode of That Pedal Show where Dan was trying to match a pedal to the colour of his yellow trousers or pants as some of you like to call them.

I turned my mind...

This particular post was triggered by a recent video I came across which compared the various Mini Klon/Klone style pedals (Not Nano!!!) doing the rounds at the moment. I see lots of posts about the Mini Mosky Golden Horse on Pedalboards of Doom these days - but there is only one proper Golden Horse - and that’s the Decibelics one - more of that later.

After viewing the Mini head-to-head comparisons I then flipped across to the Australian Super Fun guy’s Klon review from late 2017. In the ...

Australia and New Zealand together have a fair few brands of international repute, and I for one certainly have a number of pedals of Australian origin in my collection. Foremost amongst those is Michael Ibrahim’s eponymous MI Audio / MI Effects - from which range past and present - I have 7 to date - with a couple more on the ’nice-to-have’ wishlist. Of the ones I have 2 are permanent features in my pedal-chain - the Super Crunch Box V2 (my Brown Sound pedal of choice) and ...

2018 has been a really surprising year for pedals - there have been quite a few unexpected innovations along the way with also some of the usual production delays and holdups. As I write this I am still waiting for my long-overdue Jackson Audio Bloom to arrive - but I expect it will be worth the delay. I would have liked to have seen the Empress Zoia despatched this year too, as sort of predicted though - I feel that it will be pushed into next year - to coincide with Winter NAMM possibly - in ...