This edition comes rather hot on the heels of the recent 12 Degrees of Overdrive version as many readers’ inquiries questioned a couple of missing categories there - which I explained would rather figure within the Distortion contingent which is present here in all its glory!

As always, these is some considerable amount of grey science at play here - best typified by the Big Muff and Rat circuits - which are both very much distortions as well as fuzz varieties. I have 3 x 12 ...

Most should know by now that I’m a huge Rat aficionado - and for me Rat doesn’t just mean those original ProCo Rat varieties but all the different derivatives - direct and indirect - old and new, classics, rarities and outliers. This category is titled ’Rat-Style’ so there’s a few Rat-adjacent pedals here too which share some of the core fundamentals and bring to mind some key associations with that well-known highly textured frequency profile.

For me at a fundamental level there are 3 ...

June hasn’t been a particularly kind month to me - in fact it’s been something of a difficult period - I was going to call this piece ’The Darkness Lingers’ but didn’t really want that particular NLP on this blog - which I try to keep as positive as is practically possible.

A number of ventures and collaborations I was working on this month came a cropper when the other collaborating parties somewhat inexplicably and suddenly ended their involvement - which means well over a solid week’s ...

Yet another Pedal Primary Colour Wheel derived article - I must surely be running out of these colour-associated varieties soon. In my original piece I recalled the alliteration of Lovepedal’s Purple Plexi which made that the most obvious Purple Pedal association, yet I also mentioned how Jimi Hendrix had inspired a number of Purple Fuzz Pedals. This is as distinct from the Violet Ram’s Head Muff - which is associated with a slightly different hue. Here the colour Purple is that colour best ...

Denmark is a country which is known for punching above its weight - particularly in the field of exports - with a number of globally renown brands in several categories - including Bang and Olufsen, Ecco shoes, Georg Jensen jewellery, LEGO, The Republic of Fritz Hansen furniture (Arne Jacobsen etc.) and Stelton homewares. So it’s no surprise really that so many of its pedal brands are well-known too - particularly of course TC Electronic - which is one of the overall Big 4 along with Boss, ...

Back in January, I started on this year’s Fuzz Tone Quest (2018 Year of Fuzz) with 5 articles on key fuzz types - Fuzz Face, Big Muff, Tone Bender, Rat and Unique/Unusual. One category I foolishly overlooked was the mac daddy original fuzz - the Gibson Maestro FZ-1 Fuzz-Tone - most notable for its use on the Rolling Stones’ track ’I Can’t Get No Satisfaction’.

This earliest of fuzzes was made with 3 Germanium Transistors and was pretty raw and rough and ...