A few notes in advance! Obviously I’m a huge fan of Analog Modulations in particular, and especially compact boxes - which deliver the largest numbers in my reference collection. While I do also like Portrait style 1590BB types too - and these are mostly they! The Hamstead Redwing is a little larger, and the Boss XS-100 is one of the largest pedals I have in my collection - and appears here somewhat shrunk down - otherwise this selection would look decidedly odd.

There were some very deep ...

I first featured the Old Blood Noise x Emily Hopkings Parting back on January 21st. All the demos were great, but I was massively put off by the overly cluttered nature of the artwork. Even in the early monochrome edition - that ultra busy design made it really hard to even look in the direction of the pedal - I imagine anyone on the spectrum would not have reacted well to that design. It kind of drowned out the functional ability of the pedal - and made it look far tricker to deploy than it ...

"Continua is a stereo dynamic sampler and multi-effect that doesn’t just play your sound back : it listens to how you play and reacts in real time, capturing, shaping and transforming your repeats through a wide range of controls including mix, tempo (TAP function included), pitch, sustain, freeze, glitch, dimension, lo-fi, downsampling, reverb, smear and filter."

I am a huge fan of Continua’s predecessor - the Ricorda Granular Reverb, and will undoubtedly love this new one just as much - ...

Interesting one from Mr. Black - a Dual Digital Delay Line recreation of the Boss CE-1 Chorus, set out of phase for glorious stereo output. I have plenty of MISO Chorus Pedals, but very few Stereo In and Out.

This is a really straightforward pedal to operate with essentially 2 modes - Normal and Stereo, and you can even Save a favourite Preset - which is then recalled by holding down the left footswitch.

You have the core 3 controls up top - Wet/Dry Mix, Depth, and Rate. Then you have ...

This article is mostly about the new Guitar Essentials Limited Edition of the Darkglass Anagram - which is exclusively available at Andertons in the UK, and Sweetwater in the USA. It is a noted ’Limited Edition’ while no finite quantity has been defined or declared, so possibly the limitation is solely by way of those 2 outlets!

There are so many interesting angles on this release. The fact that Darkglass and Neural DSP were both founded by Douglas Castro. Douglas sold Darkglass to Korg in ...

A super busy month - with plenty of highlights and heatwaves.

My house is finally cooling down as I write these last few observations - we’ve had around 10 days of oppressive heat now, and there’s another wave on the way at the end of this week - which makes for very difficult conditions to have sessions with said pedals.

We’re in the final consequence of global climate change now - with increasingly more extreme weather patterns occurring - alternately cold snaps, heatwaves, and torrential ...

So the mission here was to shrink down the White Whale V2 Tremo-Verb into a smaller, more compact and more pedalboard-friendly unit - while maintaining the full fidelity of the original large unit - obviously with a few less options and some slight differences, but all the essentials wholly intact!

And Christos has done a quite superb job here. There are smaller spring tank units available, but nothing in the All-Analog Tremo-Verb Category (see below for size comparisons).

The device is...

It’s thanks to Leon Todd that I’m onto this intriguing new brand Sonisfact. They do have their own fairly minimal website, but no direct sales currently that I can see.

There are a handful of active dealers currently including Thailand’s CT Music - which I’ve referenced here, also Taiwan’s MOMO, and a couple of others I can’t properly access. AI tells me that you can buy direct from the Sonisfact site too, but I’m not seeing anything there - just 2 contact emails - info@sonisfact.com and ...

I kind of fluked this one in scoring one of the limited 100 run Black and Lavender edition Somersaults from June 2019, in specific #72. Someone was selling a pristine version on Ebay - listed as being a ’Dark Blue’ edition! - where it’s quite evidently the Black and Lavender one in pretty much perfect condition.

I was hoping to score either the Black and Lavender or the Gear Hero Cosmic Purple Sparkle Editions - I put the Black one on my watchlist, and was made an offer I could not refuse!...