And so to my roundup of the best gear of the year - apologies of course if I’ve overlooked one of your favourites - and note again that this year I’ve split out Boost & Overdrive - and Distortion separately - as there are so many new pedals that it’s tough to fit them all into a single summary overview. Some of these pedals are incredibly extended range - and if I’ve used them more on the distortion side - you will find those listed in the very next Distortion Rundown article - like say the...
JHS certainly have next level marketing panache - and this is another beautifully packaged project all-round.
A truly easy assembly solderless kit consisting of just 25 parts all told - plus a tube of goop, and an underside sticker. It’s your classic 3-knob Klon - with JHS Shamrock Mod - i.e. the -/+ switch which adds a +4dB Gain Boost.
The Circuit Board/s are fully pre-populated with all the essential components - while like an Airfix / Revell model kit you need to separate the 2 ...
So back in 2019 - Reverb.com coordinated Black Friday Limited Blacked Out Editions across 17 Brands and 19 Pedals - and by and large it was a resounding success - a lot of those sold out very quickly - and overall pretty much every special pedal maid was sold in fairly short order.
I always thought it a little surprising that this exercise wasn’t repeated more often as I kind of expected it to be an annual or biennial thing following on from the 2019 event. While we’ve had to wait 4 years ...
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 ...
So this past year or so (in fact back to September of last year) has seen a slew of classic pedal ’Revivals’ starting with the Orange Amps 1977 ’inspired by’ revivals, then the Marshall 1998 / 1992 square box series - very exacting nigh identical reproductions, then the SGFX Diamond Pedals Revival, and now another 1977 ’original’ series revival.
Only the Marshall ones are proper and exacting reproductions, the Orange trio was a modern range in that same sort of original enclosure - but with...
This year has seen a number of additions to my Uni-Vibe roster - where 9 of the 14 featured here are proper bulb / photocell varieties - indicated by the bulb icon. Some of these have Uni-Vibe as secondary voices, and some are very slightly adjacent or produce Uni-Vibe tones via other means.
New additions this year have been the Colortone Roundhouse, EQD The Depths, Fjord Fuzz Njord, Formula B Vintage-Vibe, ThorpyFX ER-2, and and Tru-Fi Ghost Vibe. For the longest time I just had 2 Uni-...
I’m expecting this post to attract a lot of ’whataboutisms’ as many of my rundowns seem to do. While every single choice / selection here is well considered, pondered upon on and properly weighted up against pertinent criteria and then further rationalised, whittled and distilled down into a top 9 or 16 or 25 - as I always favour symmetrical grids.
If I find 18 or 19 suitable candidates - then only 16 can be featured on the grid etc. - you need to draw the line somewhere. And you can also ...
So this is the second of this series - where the first was more about the uniqueness of the enclosure shape - more structural really - covering the overall form factor. While this edition is more about ’Trade Dress’ or the Memorability of the Aesthetics - style of graphics, consistency of theme, and consistency of control topology - doing something in a consistently measurable way that makes that pedal instantly recognisable from afar as belonging to a certain single brand.
So this one is ...
So a follower on Instagram asked me to do a piece on which pedals had Sweepable mids - meaning really semi-parametric mids - with one control for Mids Frequency, and another to Cut/Boost that Frequency.
I thought there were a lot more than those that I finally uncovered. It’s mostly distortion pedals that have 3-Band EQs, and so it stands to reason - that it’s mostly distortion pedals that have parametric mids too.
While there is also a now long discontinued series - by Big Tone Music ...
So May started with my posting the last of the NAMM Show stragglers, followed by an initial eclectic mix of different pedal types - while gradually leaning into ’Andy Timmons’ Month. I’ve always thought Andy to be a wonderful human being and a particularly fine journeyman guitarist. While it’s only in fairly recent years that he’s become somewhat more elevated in my affections as one of my all-time favourite guitar heroes. You will note that he did not feature in my last article on personal ...