The 3 Pedal Challenge was in constant circulation last year on a variety of discussion groups, and I’ve kind of been biding my time in the hope I would have more options to choose from by now, but there has been no significant addition this year to unseat any of my established selections.

There are various ways to go about the 3 Pedal Challenge - where some individuals simply just select their 3 favourite pedals - without any particular rhyme or reason. While for me it’s a ...

The third in my 2020 roundup series covers interesting and innovative Delay and Reverb Pedals released during the year, while it excludes the bigger Reverb Workstation Pedals - which I already featured back on November 30th. In that article I declared 2020 to be the ’Year of Reverb’ - as there have been so many quality releases in that genre.

Here we deal mostly with compact and medium variants with slightly fewer modes and parameters, but not necessarily entirely. The one pedal that puts ...

I’m still picking off some of the stragglers from the recent NAMM show - and I was waiting for a few more details on this pedal to emerge - where we now at least have a decent reference photo, but no sign of price or availability yet.

This looks like a really cool pedal - a 3-mode combined Reverb and Delay with very simple controls. It has 4 knobs - Mix, Tone, Reverb Decay and Delay Feedback - to go with its 3 toggle-selected modes :

1. Ambient Reverb + Analog Delay
2. Modulated

So I thought I would combine the Mini Pedal selection with the final overall category roundup featuring my current favourites and forthcoming/future acquisition targets. The above visual may be somewhat convoluted, but it well illustrates the trade off in footprint and practicality/utility you get across the different enclosure form factors.

I’ve stated before that I’ve largely moved away from the larger styles of enclosures in favour of more pedals of a more compact nature - which means ...

This article follows on from the recent Vertical aspect medium enclosure roundup where I indicated a number of potential acquisition targets. Here we have the same enclosure size but width-ways in orientation - with a key differentiator being the number of pedals here with dual footswitches - where all but two either have a second Channel or additional Boost option.

There are two permanent fixtures of my pedal-chain here - the Empress Heavy and MI Effects Megalith Delta which have ...

2018 has been a really surprising year for pedals - there have been quite a few unexpected innovations along the way with also some of the usual production delays and holdups. As I write this I am still waiting for my long-overdue Jackson Audio Bloom to arrive - but I expect it will be worth the delay. I would have liked to have seen the Empress Zoia despatched this year too, as sort of predicted though - I feel that it will be pushed into next year - to coincide with Winter NAMM possibly - in ...

Not unusually for me, but pretty much all of these that I don’t have yet are on my wishlist, and I’m still deciding on what order to acquire those in and which ’I need’ the most! My current big metal pedal trio consists of the excellent Diezel VH4-2, Empress Heavy and MI Effects Megalith Delta - I set the Diezel at the most extreme gain, then the Megalith Delta, and then the two voicings of the Empress Heavy. Each of these is a dual drive so there are myriad options here...