At one stage there was a 50/50 chance as to whether I would make the show - as there were significant disruptions on the Liverpool Street to Norwich line - which meant a bus replacement service between Colchester and Ipswich. Some of the journey times quoted were up to 4 and a 1/2 hours each way! In the end the door-to-door was closer to 3 hours in total! The journey up including the coach was actually more fun that the journey back via Cambridge. Cambridge has obviously sinned grievously as ...

Somewhat unbeknownst to me - Zakk Wylde has had his own Black Sabbath cover band since 2014. This particular Overdrive release celebrates that facet of Zakk’s musicality - and delivers a suitably chunky crunchy sound!

Controls - Output, Tone, Gain.

I believe these are all signed by Zakk Wylde himself, and are available for a pretty decent price - $170 in the USA, and £175 in the UK - available from your usual Jim Dunlop / MXR stockists.

It comes in a really attractive purple sparkle...

Obviously all the PowerBolt Series pedals ship with stock orange knobs - but since I have so many pedals - I need to be able to easily identify what is what - and so I’ve replaced each of those orange knobs with pertinent unique colour replacement knobs.

When The PowerBolt Series launched last year - I bought 4 sets of knobs from Love My Switches. I used the Dark and Light Blue ones on the PowerTrem and PowerVibe pedals last year, and the remaining Purple and Hot Pink / Violet were perfect ...

I’m fairly well versed inTraynor Solid State amps from the late 70’ and 80’s - which were much loved by garage punks and garage rockers alike - for those slightly loose, raw and ragged, even scuzzy kind of rock tones. And the lower-gain side of the pedal is in part inspired by the Bluesbreaker - with heaps of brightness in the mix, and with the voice toggle up - delivers a uniquely bright and clangy kind of sound with some real bite to it too. You can of course dial that out by lowering the ...

The Gain Box was very evidently designed for the 4 Channels / Voices to be stacked, each individual voice isn’t particularly strong on its own, but gains significant potency when combined with one or two or all of the others.

I would really have preferred a little more output volume, and probably a Tilt EQ vs the current LPF style Filter for more overall oomph! I started with all dials at Noon, and then added or subtracted as appropriate - adding Presets and Combinations as I progressed ...

So this new H9 is essentially a fully-loaded Single Core variant of the H90. The larger H90 predecessor allows you to deploy 2 x Stereo Effects simultaneously - and hence is referred to as a Dual-Core Multi-Effects Processor. Where the new Gen 2 H9 has all the same key features and functions as the H90 - but can only deploy a single Stereo Effect at a time - hence Single-Core.

The original unit had a cool looking but pretty useless onboard interface - which was mostly saved by the Bluetooth...

I recall the original Core Series very well - and picked up those 4 original compacts - per the below original range visual. You had the Edge, ODI, Rail, and ROUS (per bottom row of visual) - where 3 of those have now been revived and enhanced.

Pettyjohn then did a number of additional very limited small batch custom compact editions - which covered most of the same territory as these 11 new editions. I feel a couple of these might be brand new - certainly the Moss X Fuzz. ...

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 ...

The Kudu is a really cool circuit developed by Dan Coggins as a smart multi-clipping tone-enhancer - created to make everything it touches sound better. Thorpy and Dan have run the pedal into a vast array of pedals and amps - and the pedal never fails to improve the texture and tonality of the device that it pushes.

There’s no less than 12 Diodes onboard - while 6 of those are for power management. Which leaves 2 x 2N4148 Silicon Diodes for Soft Clipping, 2 x Red LED’s for Hard Clipping, ...