In a fairly signifiant innovation here - David has managed to distil down two of his most popular amps - the Plexi-style Small Box 50, and Hot-Rodded Plexi / JCM800 style BE-100 - into a single relatively compact 2-Channel + Boost format. Interestingly, and differently to the full-fat Victory Amplification V4 floor-based amps (Analog Tube Preamp + Analog Power Amp), David splits the two halves of the circuit into Tube Analog (Preamp), and DSP Modelling (Power Amp, Cab Sim & IR’s). This ...

This article has been a long time coming - where I originally started this ahead of the Mini Edition - which went live on January 24th. I was waiting for a couple of new pedals to be released - while the article has been iterated around 20 times now with a number of recent additions.

And the pedal I was waiting to launch still hasn’t quite happened, while the builder has authorised me to tease it in advance of its official release. And if I were to do the same exercise tomorrow - no doubt ...

As you will see in my forthcoming end of the month Pedal Chain Update - I acquired an Eventide H90 Harmonizer over the Christmas period - before that - my various Power Supplies / Outlets were already at Maximum capacity / use - with all outlets already assigned.

This means that I inevitably had to add one more Power Supply into the mix - where the only suitable candidates really came from Cioks - as the H90 requires at least 1,200 mA of current - where you need to use a Cioks Parallel ...

This article has been such a long time coming - I last did a compact high gain distortion pedal roundup all the way back in 2019 - where only 24 featured. This time around I was determined to have it as comprehensive as possible, and like the recent 32 Overdrive and 32 Mini Fuzz selections - I was determined to have all in my reference collection.

I’ve long been a fan of heavier / metal textures and tones, and have always had certain pedal-chain slots dedicated to high gain pedals - in ...

And so it begins again! This time punctuated by Virtual NAMM / Believe in Music Week and some certain JA incident.

I will include a mini NAMM roundup here of what some of my favourites were. In the past I’ve done a separate highlights article on the subject - but there really weren’t that many releases this time around to warrant such - in fact I would estimate only around 10% of the volume released in 2020 and 2019.

I will also indicate where I think I’m heading for the year and what ...

And here is the first of the category overviews for the year - combining those Overdrive and Distortion pedals which sparked some interest for me. Note that there will be 4 of these types of articles - Overdrive & Distortion (this one), Fuzz, Delay and Reverb (exc. Reverb Workstation already covered), and Modulation + Pitch + Untility pedals. Before I then reveal my overall 25 or so favourite favourite pedals for the year in a Best-of-the-Best listing - with possibly some sneaky additions....

This has been a long time coming for some - with just the merest of glimpses at Winter NAMM - where I feel the few boxes we saw there were surely empty shells - as I never witnessed any actual play-through. Considering how much of a perfectionist Dave Friedman is it’s all understandable really as we know he would not release anything he’s not 100% happy with.

So it’s taken the best part of the year to tweak and tune this one to perfection. In terms of where it sits - ...

This edition comes rather hot on the heels of the recent 12 Degrees of Overdrive version as many readers’ inquiries questioned a couple of missing categories there - which I explained would rather figure within the Distortion contingent which is present here in all its glory!

As always, these is some considerable amount of grey science at play here - best typified by the Big Muff and Rat circuits - which are both very much distortions as well as fuzz varieties. I have 3 x 12 ...

In my recent coverage of Eddie Van Halen’s Signature Pedals I indicated that I had none of the usual suspects Overdrives/Distortions - or namely MXR EVH 5150, Wampler Pinnacle Deluxe and Seymour Duncan Diamondhead. While in fact I have well over 20 Brown Sound Style variants in my collection of various different sizes - with the vast majority being compact enclosures as featured here. I make no secret of the fact that the compact size format is my faourite and particularly for these sorts of ...