So I’ve recently acquired the Flower Pedals Hosta Wah Filter and Spaceman Artemis Modulated Filter, and before the AWOL Pedals Flow materialised, I was about ready to call it for my preferred filter selection. Those 4 pedals - Dusk, Hosta, Micro-Tron III, and Artemis really have me covered for all bases. While I quite like the look of the AWOL Flow too as a more incidental backup - for when my pedal-chain is deployed somewhat differently and needs to be able to accommodate an additional ...

This article was prompted by an observation of obviously complementary fuzz pairings - where I currently own all of these bar the two Dwarfcraft Devices - Limited Edition Necromancer and Reese Lightning. In fact a number of these could be construed to be officially highly limited - where Buffalo FX and Dwarfcraft Devices have both ceased trading and their products are in very short supply. There were only 25 dual-footswitch editions of the Dwarfcraft Devices Limited Edition Dark Arts ...

I am a touch sad to read that after 13 great years of innovation and independent creativity - the power couple at the heart of Dwarfcraft Devices - Benjamin Hinz and Louise Woletz Hinz - have decided to move on to pastures new. It seems both have landed their dream jobs very recently - which will likely give them more stability and a better quality of life than they have hitherto enjoyed through making pedals - obviously with the current economic uncertainty it’s great to have a positive route ...

I have covered off a number of my favourite Summer NAMM pedals already - including the Boss 200 range, RC-10R and SY-1, the Fulltone OCD Ge, the REVV G2, the Spaceman Effects Gemini IV, and Walrus Audio Kangra for instance. And there’s a couple more surprise ones I will be posting as dedicated features very soon - so stay alert for those! In the wake of one of the best ever Winter NAMM’s it was clear that the Summer NAMM could never match that degree of innovation - in fact most of ...

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’m sort of getting to full saturation point with drive, distortion and fuzz pedals - with my ’2018 Year of Fuzz’ coming to a close it’s time to direct my attentions slightly further afield and in new directions. I’ve always had an interest in sort of randomised textural effects - which means that my next significant area of interest will be that roughly defined by the category of ’Glitch’.

Most of the featured devices here are different types ...

When I did my piece on 9 of the Best Phaser Pedals back in July of last year, the Subdecay Quasar DLX was probably the most feature-rich of those mentioned. Now nearly a year later we have 4 slightly unusual medium-sized phasers all vying for attention within pretty much the same sort of form-factor - and each is really quite different from the other.

As I was compiling that piece, it was just a fraction in advance of the release of the Spaceman Effects Explorer. I’ve developed ...

I always expect to be excited by the new prospects introduced at Summer NAMM, but it can be somewhat antic-climactic, particularly compared to this year’s very formidable Winter NAMM show. Several pedals that were announced there are still alas somewhat in the ether. I was expecting to see updates of the Empress Zoia and the Keeley Stereo Tape Delay pedal - but those were not forthcoming, which most probably means some production delays - I certainly can’t imagine the Zoia is going ...

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 ...