As mentioned previously - I meant to feature Lastgasp Art Laboratories (LAL / Lastgasp) quite a while back, but access to pedals from the UK has been rather limited, and most of these therefore fairly hard to come by! I detailed how there were only two properly active current dealers that had most of the range in stock - my good friend Andy Ebsen’s Effekt Boutique in Germany, and Perfect Circuit in the USA. I also was instrumental in getting Joe’s Pedals’ Joe Light to connect with Lastgasp’s ...

So scanning through this month it seems to have been mostly about Guitar / Pedal Shows, Japanese Pedals, and Pedals Delayed and Missing in the Post!

The Guitar Shows have been pretty fast and furious for March - with two of the most significant ones of the year, along with a fledgling grassroots one : The Guitar Show (Cranmore Park - Birmingham / Shirley), London Synth & Pedal Expo (Studio 9294, Hackney Wick, London), The Alternative Guitar Show (The Fighting Cocks, Kingston).

I of ...

I have quite a number of Super Fuzzes in the collection by now - and this Lastgasp Art Laboratories variant is another wonderful take on that format - with some quite distinct circuit differences - but most importantly it has all the flavour - and those fantastic blooming and percolating waves of harmonic fuzz.

The circuit topology is somewhat different to the norm - being composed of a mix of C1815 Transistors and JRC4558DD opamp. I’m not particularly familiar with the C1815’s, but ...

So this has been on the cards for a long while - I’ve had Lastgasp Art Laboratories on the list for a roundup for a really long time now. I had been intending to acquire a few of its pedals for a while - but they’ve never been particularly easily accessible from within the UK.

There are currently just 2 dealers worldwide who have most of the range in stock - Perfect Circuit in the USA, and my friend Andy Ebsen’s Effekt Boutique in Germany - where indeed I acquired my first two Lastgasp ...

Andy Ebsen’s Effekt Boutique has been one of my own essential pedal reference and resource website for many years now. Andy is so smart with his curation and pedal selection - that there are several pedals there that just cannot easily be found elsewhere if at all. I regularly check in on Effekt-Boutique.de several times a week - just to see what smart pedal choices Andy has most recently unearthed!

Over the years I have acquired a fair few pedals from Effekt Boutique - obviously...

Australia and New Zealand together have a fair few brands of international repute, and I for one certainly have a number of pedals of Australian origin in my collection. Foremost amongst those is Michael Ibrahim’s eponymous MI Audio / MI Effects - from which range past and present - I have 7 to date - with a couple more on the ’nice-to-have’ wishlist. Of the ones I have 2 are permanent features in my pedal-chain - the Super Crunch Box V2 (my Brown Sound pedal of choice) and ...

I just took delivery of my Abracadabra Audio Ayahuasca Trem-Fuzz today - a collaborative sister brand to Joel Korte’s Chase Bliss Audio - these pedals are very much leftfield Chase Bliss Pedals in all but name really, what sets them apart is very limited edition runs of their so far single Trem-Fuzz pedal. Up until recently it has only really been available to US consumers - but they seem to have opened up their order book internationally recently. As far as I can tell my pedal is part of...

You cannot talk about Octave Fuzz Pedals without mentioning Jimi Hendrix and his sound technician Roger Mayer - who together collaborated to create the very first octave pedal - the Octavia - which reproduced the input signal from a guitar one octave higher in pitch, and mixed it with the original and added fuzz. This sound is best known via the classic Hendrix tracks Purple Haze and Fire which went on to inspire a whole category of pedals - including the other legendary octave pedal - the ...

I’ve already covered off most of the major reverbs in my 12 Reverb Workstations post, as well as some of the more unusual ones in the one on Ambient Delay + Reverb Pedals; I will also be doing a separate post on Spring Reverbs. This article covers the more spacey sci-fi style reverbs - which give you a taste of that otherworldly dimension of deep outer-space.

These are all about modulation really, and how they manipulate, move and make those frequencies dance, shimmer and sparkle...