A super busy month - with plenty of highlights and heatwaves.

My house is finally cooling down as I write these last few observations - we’ve had around 10 days of oppressive heat now, and there’s another wave on the way at the end of this week - which makes for very difficult conditions to have sessions with said pedals.

We’re in the final consequence of global climate change now - with increasingly more extreme weather patterns occurring - alternately cold snaps, heatwaves, and torrential ...

I kind of fluked this one in scoring one of the limited 100 run Black and Lavender edition Somersaults from June 2019, in specific #72. Someone was selling a pristine version on Ebay - listed as being a ’Dark Blue’ edition! - where it’s quite evidently the Black and Lavender one in pretty much perfect condition.

I was hoping to score either the Black and Lavender or the Gear Hero Cosmic Purple Sparkle Editions - I put the Black one on my watchlist, and was made an offer I could not refuse!...

May has been a little bit of strange month - lots of delays really, and waiting for pedals to land.

As inevitably happens most months - much was delayed this month, and I was unable to complete some of the larger articles - they will need to wait until next month, there’s certainly lots of projects in progress. Where new and imminent arrivals kind of scuppered several intended projects - hopefully they can be completed in June.

The first event I’m attending this month is tomorrow - as a micropub ...

It seems quite timely that I just recently covered off the Caroline Parabola Pawnshop Tremolo - with its lush, warm-sounding higher gain preamp. Apparently the very same preamp that’s also in the Caroline Météore Lo-Fi Reverb. Caroline Guitar wisely decided to give this excellent preamp a solo outing!

So this new overdrive pedal further celebrates and honours Aaron Graves, who has long been associated with the brand. We get quite a beautifully warm and granular overdrive here with 2 x gain ...

I had kind of overlooked the Caroline Guitar Co. modulation pedals for a while, where the one that had always interested me the most was the Arigato Phaser - which took me a while to get to for whatever reason! I eventually landed that one near the start of this month!

I was so impressed with the Arigato - Phaser / Vibrato / Vibe that I decided that I should go for all 3 of the Caroline Modulation pedals - Arigato Phaser, Parabola Tremolo, and Somersault Lo-Fi Modulator.

One of my ...

I originally featured this pedal on the site back in January of 2023 - so it’s been on the cards for a while! I obviously need to juggle a lot of priorities all the time - and some pedals unfortunately fall through the cracks momentarily - while I mostly manage to recover them at a later stage!

This Arigato is my 4th Caroline pedal, and I love it so much that I’m very tempted to pick up Philippe’s other 2 modulations - the Parabola Tremolo, and Somersault Lo-Fi Modulator / Chorus. 

The ...

This project has been a long time in the making - I actually started off this compilation properly last autumn, and then have iterated the final selection a number of times since then - before reaching this final format. I apologise to anyone whom I’ve inadvertently left out - I still have a number of Octave Fuzzes to require - that task is never ending!

I own around 80 octave fuzzes so far - and this is near enough half of those - where I’ve mostly leant into compact editions - and ...

Caroline has significantly ramped up its Kilobyte Lo-Fi Delay with a much more expansive and granular 8 controls topology.

At its core this has a PT2399 chip with an official maximum factory delay time of 300ms. While that has been ’stretched’ and filtered to deliver the 500ms+ Lo-Fi delay variation. Caroline deliberately doesn’t provide max delay time - as it can vary enormously from just over 500ms to more than 800ms.

Controls - Level, Sharpness (Most Lo-Fi CCW), Preamp / Saturation, ...

So February, as expected, turned out to be quite the slow moving month - with not too many featured releases. You always get the big announcements at NAMM - and then it takes a few months typically for those pedals to filter through.

There were a few heavy hitters that emerged in February or sooner - including the Kernom Elipse Modulation Playground, and the Polyend Step Drum Machine Pedal - both of which went on the board this month.

I also made the Plutoneium Chi-Wah-Wah a permanent ...