The final arrangement for the year - all the pedals that impressed the most!

So we featured 120 pedals across the 5 Genre categories this year - as you’ve witnessed over the last 5 days, and those have been whittled and distilled down to these 27 Magnificent and Exceedingly Flavoursome candidates.

Picking out the very best of those is obviously a slightly subjective exercise while based on a series of exacting criteria - including innovation, versatility, practicality, variability, playability, quality of manufacture, quality of output and sheer enjoyment.

Here ...

The Modutility roundup combines Modulation, Utility and Pitch type pedals - it also includes Multi-FX and Multi-Modulation pedals of course. Some years this selection is relatively sparse - while this year it’s totally chock-a-block! In fact it was a struggle to whittle the Longlist down - and inevitably some pedals I wanted to feature did not make the cut - including the Endorphin.es Ghost Pedal Multi-FX and Subdecay Prometheus 3 Dual Super Filter.

I still feel that this selection of 26 is...

And so to what is often my favourite category - the many wonderful flavours of fuzz - and we have some hugely innovative pedals in the selection this year - one of these may even be my pedal of the year!

So there are 24 in this year’s selection - where I’m just missing the Collision Devices TARS, Fender Shields Blender, JAM Pedals Octaurus, KMA Machines Mandrake, Reeves Electro Facet IZ, and Unsound Circuitry Kato Glitch Fuzz - where I will attempt to add most of those to the reference ...

Wow what a wild ride of a month - one of the busiest to date - bookmarked with two superb events. You really need to read my event round-ups - they’re so full of little details - and of course personalities - the bigger friendship network and sort of family that makes up this magnificent sector in many ways. For sure everyone is in hard competition with each other for the same customer money - but there’s genuine warmth of spirit - a friendliness and willingness to cooperate and get along. Both...

The Rainger FX Dr Freakenstein / Chop Fuzz is its most celebrated circuit - which dates all the way back to a very custom enclosure 2009 edition which came in a plastic casing, had no footswitch, and of which only 50 were made. The key focus for many of the earlier models was the fairly unique (for pedals) Knife / Blade Switch which turned the power to the pedal on. This was a key feature of the larger sized Dr Freakenstein Fuzzes until those parts became impossible to source in and around 2020...

Let’s start off with a massive thank you to Unity Street Audio’s Mel Pereira for organising this shindig! The Wassup Nerds!?! Pedal and Noise-Maker Event at Rough Trade Bristol was a runaway success this Sunday just passed. I was hoping to have this article up sooner - but these things take time, and I had other priorities to juggle too.

Bristol looked resplendent on the day too in the dappled sunshine - all those historic buildings looked magnificent - and there was a Prets within easy ...

A reader asked me to pick out some of my all-time favourite fuzzes - which are legion actually - just far too many to include in a single rundown. So we settled on doing somewhat less well known favourite fuzzes - under the guise of ’Secret Weapon Fuzzes’. These are mostly somewhat under the radar classics - several of which are discontinued, but all of which deliver distinct superior tones.

Beyond these being Secret Weapon Fuzzes there was no other specific theme - so we get a variety of ...

I’ve been meaning to do this article ever since the Witney Pedal Party event - where we lucky few who attended - were spellbound by some David Rainger magic - courtesy of a sort of combination performance and demo piece which mostly made use of the above 3 core pedals but in fact included every pedal in the range at some stage.

The Snare Trap and Drone Rainger have a real Dubby / SoundSystem dynamic to them - where in this context - this particular combination kind of renders as a sort of 3...