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Near the start of this week we saw several leading pedal builder brands go all mysterious on us posting an encircled (B) logo ident accompanied by the hashtag #BLACKEDXOUT on various social media. Many thought this to mean some sort of limited or black edition pedals for the Black Friday ’sales’, while I wrongly guessed it implied a Black Friday Sales boycott.

This afternoon all was revealed when 17 Brands together released all-black stealth-like enclosures for one or a few...

UPDATE - Auction Results at base of article (below!)

I will start by saying that while not the biggest ever fan of Steely Dan, I am more than aware of their important cultural impact and influence in popular music. As a kid of the 80’s I sort of picked up on the second wave of Steely Dan - first with Club House’s major club smash mashup of Do It Again with Billie Jean (1983), then the use of ’Peg’ in De La Soul’s ’Eye Know’ (1989) - I also ...

There have been a smattering of new Guitar Synth pedals recently - including at the January NAMM show, so I thought it would be opportune to do a round-up of some of my preferred choices - the significant new ones, and some older favourites.

I’ve deliberately left out a few of the larger usual suspects here - including the Boss SY-300, Glou Glou Moutarde and Hologram Infinite Jets Resynthesizer - all of which I’ve featured before. Instead I’ve focused more on the ...

I originally intended to do a 20 strong feature, but decided that since I had already covered 5 medium pedals in my recent ’Rat’ overview I could get away with 16 here. Since some of the enclosure sizes here are quite large, it doesn’t really make sense to cram in too many - so the 16 limit just about does the job. Whenever I do one of these features I always feel that I may have overlooked some essential/s - if you could please let me know in the comments if I’ve missed...

I have indicated several times in my posts that I love Compact Enclosure pedals the best, but I also have an affinity for Mini pedals - particularly Mini Boost, Compressors, Fuzz and Overdrive. I never thought it was likely to happen, but for my preferred Klone pedal I went from an original Mini Tumnus up to the Deluxe version, but that slot is now taken by the diminutive Decibelics Golden Horse - which I prefer to both of the Tumni!

I have also indicated many times that I’m not ...

UPDATE - When I originally wrote this piece in October of last year, I seem to have overlooked some of the more compact pedals - possibly because they were hard to get or out of stock at the time. Now as my pedal-chain has reached 39 slots, there is no way I could accommodate anything beyond a compact-size pedal - so I’ve appended those original choices to this features - namely the Analog.Man Block Letter Envelope Filter, the Mu-FX Micro-Tron III and VFE Mini Mu.

I have already ...

You cannot talk about Octave Fuzz Pedals without mentioning Jimi Hendrix and his sound technician Roger Mayer - who together collaborated to create the very first octave pedal - the Octavia - which reproduced the input signal from a guitar one octave higher in pitch, and mixed it with the original and added fuzz. This sound is best known via the classic Hendrix tracks Purple Haze and Fire which went on to inspire a whole category of pedals - including the other legendary octave pedal - the ...

NOTE - newer update : [here]

I have already covered off some of the simpler Envelope Filter pedals in my piece on Wah / Auto Wah pedals. All of those featured here are somehwat more feature-rich and add different flavours into the mix like fuzz, phasing and oscillation. I tend to me more aligned to the more compact pedals - so most of these are a little large for my needs, my Boss MD-500 has some superb filter options too and really supplies me with most of the envelope filter ...

We’ve already covered the more all-rounder digital delays within the ’Digital Workstation Pedals’ article from a couple of months ago. This piece focuses on more specialist delay pedals - which do one or a few things really well rather than cover all the different delay algorithms possible.

There is a tiny undercurrent here of modulated delays, often with 3 modes, and some really spacey effects. Some of these pedals are more vanilla in their approach - the Mad ...

I’ve already covered off most of the major reverbs in my 12 Reverb Workstations post, as well as some of the more unusual ones in the one on Ambient Delay + Reverb Pedals; I will also be doing a separate post on Spring Reverbs. This article covers the more spacey sci-fi style reverbs - which give you a taste of that otherworldly dimension of deep outer-space.

These are all about modulation really, and how they manipulate, move and make those frequencies dance, shimmer and sparkle...