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 ...