I first featured the Old Blood Noise x Emily Hopkings Parting back on January 21st. All the demos were great, but I was massively put off by the overly cluttered nature of the artwork. Even in the early monochrome edition - that ultra busy design made it really hard to even look in the direction of the pedal - I imagine anyone on the spectrum would not have reacted well to that design. It kind of drowned out the functional ability of the pedal - and made it look far tricker to deploy than it ...

Interesting one from Mr. Black - a Dual Digital Delay Line recreation of the Boss CE-1 Chorus, set out of phase for glorious stereo output. I have plenty of MISO Chorus Pedals, but very few Stereo In and Out.

This is a really straightforward pedal to operate with essentially 2 modes - Normal and Stereo, and you can even Save a favourite Preset - which is then recalled by holding down the left footswitch.

You have the core 3 controls up top - Wet/Dry Mix, Depth, and Rate. Then you have ...

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 ...

It’s thanks to Leon Todd that I’m onto this intriguing new brand Sonisfact. They do have their own fairly minimal website, but no direct sales currently that I can see.

There are a handful of active dealers currently including Thailand’s CT Music - which I’ve referenced here, also Taiwan’s MOMO, and a couple of others I can’t properly access. AI tells me that you can buy direct from the Sonisfact site too, but I’m not seeing anything there - just 2 contact emails - info@sonisfact.com and ...

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!...

This is one of my very favourite choruses now, it sounds so impressive from first encounter. It delivers the most lush of shimmery chorus and vibrato modulations - and the extra controls over and above the original CE-2 circuit inspiration - make a huge difference to the output profile.

The ’Warp / Detune’ dial adds more fluttery textures or softens / tempers the output, ’Amp’ adds warmth and more Volume - in fact Amp has a huge amount of range! And finally ’Freq’ allows you to adjust the ...

Freqscene Effects delivers amazing improved and expanded full-flavour takes, massively evolved from Boss’s vintage analog SG-1 and CE-2 pedals - both originally from 1979. The SG-1 and CE-2 had just 2 controls each - where both the Slow Life and Koldwave get 3 additional knobs, and the Koldwave gets an additional Mode-switch too!

Freqscene has significantly expanded the scope of those pedals compared to their original source inspirations - where the Koldwave takes you into entirely new ...

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 ...

So I ordered this from my friend Andy at Effekt Boutique - back in mid-November of last year, while several production hitches delayed the arrival of the pedal - by approximately half a year! Which is one of the longest waits I’ve had to endure outside of Kickstarter and Indiegogo! But all’s well that ends well!

I’ve long been a fan of combining Reverb, Modulation and Fuzz / Distortion - for that killer dreamy hazy shoegaze effect - where I normally use a combination of single genre effects...