February can often seem a rather odd month after the hustle and bustle of NAMM Show January - where a lot of new stuff always gets announced - while increasingly outside the NAMM schedule - but certainly in and around it! Projects delayed from the previous year often get released in January, but this year those kind of seem to be more spaced out - with some not feted to happen until March / April. February always seems slow compared to January, and that sometimes extends into March too before ...
I’m a huge fan of the Boss HM-2 Heavy Metal Circuit - and its classic all-knobs-dimed output - somewhat harsh and searing Swedish Death Metal / Buzzsaw / Chainsaw / Twin Peaks Extreme Distortion tonality. While actually this Homework Series Metal pedal is not really that - you don’t ever fully get up to those levels of harshness - so this is not the pedal for those that want to exactly replicate those more extreme classic metal sounds.
Rather - what we have here is more of an Extended Range...
Misha Mannsoor’s Horizon Devices has quietly made its way to 4 superior modern tone enhancers. It kind of set the mould with its specialist Metal tone enhancing Precision Drive, then came its Apex High Gain Preamp, then the Flux Echo/Reverb - and here we have a very unique take on a Compressor.
Horizon Devices’ slogan is "Sound great, and be easy to use" and that theme is very clearly carried through all 4 pedals which are about as straightforward a pedals as you might expect to encounter -...
So 2024 is off to a pretty spirted start! I treaded myself to 2 pedals right at the tail end of the year - the Poly VERBS puts in an appearance in this month’s selection - while the Reeves Electro BHS-D is running a touch late and will be part of the February selection instead.
This time of the year has to be mostly about NAMM - while I feel that a lot of builders kind of took away from NAMM and launched / showcased their new release in advance!
I’ve still to make it to NAMM - timing’s ...
As soon as I saw this I thought - ’mini Boss OD-200’ - at least in concept. Zoom effects are fully DSP as far as I’m aware - so we don’t get a JFET input section like on the Boss and Strymon Hybrid / Digital gain pedals - while there should still be plenty of interesting flavours to be found here. The Bixonic Axentrix and Mooer Model X Preamp X2 were both instrumental in convincing me that you can get really decent gain voicings just from digital - also the Neunaber Neuron - all stand-alone ...
Wow - what can I say! The original N5 MGAT-1 was already my favourite distortion of all time - so I initially thought that this was going to be a sort of sideways step from that with more specificity to reach certain key classic era Marshall tones more easily and more precisely - and it certainly does that. While Mr Wu has kind of blown me away again - as this is incredibly a further improvement over the already exceptional MGAT-1.
The MGAT-1 Golden Era seems a little bit more poised and ...
The final arrangement for the year - all the pedals that impressed the most!
A decent showing on the Distortion side too - with some particularly great High Gain Distortions. I was due to review the Licthlaerm Gehenna and Medusa also - but with Daniel Ringl’s workshop move - that didn’t quite get sorted this year - hopefully early in the new year - and then I can update the ’Full Metal Racket’ selection which exercise I normally do late Autumn!
There’s couple of really cool filter distortions here that I really like - the Intensive Care Audio Vena Cava Filter / ...
This whole year has occurred at such breakneck speed and volume - with so much happening all day and every day - that I have perpetually felt like I was always in the process of catching up and never quite had time to catch my breath as such. I’ve taken just one whole weekend off in the whole year - and am as close to burn-out as I’ve ever been. Every time I attended a Guitar or Pedal show I was up all night doing the write-up - average time for those articles was / is around 36 hours give or ...
The new MGAT-1 GE Golden Era looks eerily similar to its stablemate predecessor. It has exactly the same control topology - but the bottom left Mid Range Toggle is no longer segmented as High, Low and Mid, but instead has ’1987X’, ’1959 SLP’, and ’2203’ labels.
Mr Wu further states :
"This is the first time I proposed the concept of dynamic similarity, which means that no matter how you change the volume on your guitar, no matter how you adjust the gain and volume on both MGAT-1 GE and...