I’ve featured a few of Shift Line’s pedals over the years, where my hitherto champion of theirs has been the now discontinued super-versatile Termofuzz Variable Mode Fuzz.

I’m always a sucker for a great gain machine - and Shift Line’s new Stages Dynamic Drive allows you to cleverly and easily shift up through the gears - as you ramp up the number of cascaded gain stages.

The pedal also has very smartly calibrated 3-Band EQ with Active Treble and Bass, and a handy sweep in the Middle ...

I really wanted the Wampler Ratsbane to have its time in the spotlight - as it’s truly a great example of the genre - albeit delivered with a TL071 ompamp in place of the more typical LM308 or OP07 variant.

As always, it’s not the only game in town - and in fact is my 3rd min Rat pedal following my BYOC Li’l Mouse and Mooer Black Secret. The BYOC sounds fantastic texturally, but is a little lacking in output - which is why generally I favoured the Black Secret on most occasions.

Beyond ...

The third in my 2020 roundup series covers interesting and innovative Delay and Reverb Pedals released during the year, while it excludes the bigger Reverb Workstation Pedals - which I already featured back on November 30th. In that article I declared 2020 to be the ’Year of Reverb’ - as there have been so many quality releases in that genre.

Here we deal mostly with compact and medium variants with slightly fewer modes and parameters, but not necessarily entirely. The one pedal that puts ...

I frequently get asked to recommend a great all-rounder every*man kind of fuzz pedal, and over the years as my own collection as grown - so has the roster of usual suspects in my recommendations, I felt that it was about time to have the definitive list up on this site so I could simply refer people to that.

There’s still quite a few more outliers here - and for reasons of symmetry I judiciously decided to omit them from inclusion on this occasion - but there are certainly a few more valid ...

So you may have read last year that I went a little overboard with fuzz type pedals - aiming initially to build up an essential reference collection of 30 of the best - I then published my ’2018 Year of Fuzz Tone Quest’ just about half way through that year - featuring 40 pedals, and right now, my current fuzz quota is running at exactly 100 pedals - with 82 compacts, 11 minis and 7 medium to large pedals making up the collection.

This overview is 24 of the best ’...

UPDATE - Based on feedback and input I’ve tweaked some of the pedal placements - the core methodology still stands, while relatively positioning of certain pedals can be fairly nuanced!

This subject matter has become the most popular of all the different articles I’ve posted. And the original piece went up in February 2017 - so I felt it was opportune to revisit, review and revise that original methodology. I’ve tried to strip out the more branded naming conventions ...

This article was triggered by a question on the most recent episode of ’Know Your Gear’ (Phillip McKnight) where someone asked about a compact pedal which combined both Delay and Reverb. The ones that immediately came to my mind were the Alexander Ski Fi, Wampler Ethereal and EarthQuaker Dispatch Master But I also thought of the larger EarthQuaker Avalanche Run, GFI System Specular Tempus and the now medium enclosure Keeley Caverns V2 which are all too large for inclusion.

  ...

My big thing his year - apart from the usual pedal-chain ToneQuest has been my separate ’Year of Fuzz’ journey for which this article will probably be a Part 1, even though I’ve already reached most of the goals I set at the start of the year, and am somewhat over quota! When I first started down this road I really did not know too much about fuzz beyond Hendrix really. I did not realise how much fuzz was actually used on so many of my favourite records and tracks. I also love...

Let me start by saying that I’m not an electronic engineer, and I will leave it to the likes of Brian Wampler to explain the circuit design whys and wherefores of resistors, transistors and capacitors. I am however a pedal aficionado and have direct experience of a great many of those - and this article is based on that.

I would encourage you to read my companion piece on ’Electric Guitar EQ’ first as that relates directly to this article, and serves as a decent run in. In fact said article...