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As with many pedal builders, the roots of Daniel’s Fjord Fuzz are firmly embedded in a particular music scene. In this instance Bergen on Norway’s West Coast - one of the 4 main corners of Norway’s creative arts - alongside Oslo, Stavanger and Tromsø, and famously home to a number of internationally celebrated artists including Annie, Erlend Øye / King’s of Convenience (sic) / Whitest Boy Alive, Datarock, Kygo, and Ralph Myerz / and the Jack Herren Band. ...

I first came into contact with Expresso FX when researching my piece on Treble Boosters back in May - where Expresso’s Germanium Boost was one of the standouts in that roundup. During my research I of course came across the Harry Holden Demo for the Expresso Germanium Boost - which then naturally led me tangentially to another of Harry’s Demos - this time covering the Expresso Germanium Fuzz - CV7005 edition.

I can’t explain it exactly - but something in the tone and ...

This article is somewhat in response to the fairly recent arrival of my long quested for Spaceman Gemini IV (originally chasing the III), and the imminent arrival of my DanDrive Austin Pride Fuzz. In fact when I was working on my last but one article on Tone Benders I was in two minds as to whether to include Paul Trombetta’s Bone Machine GTX - as I’m not 100% clear on what its circuit provenance is and exactly which fuzz family it is supposed to belong to - in the end I determined ...

I started down my Fuzz ToneQuest at the beginning of 2018 - where I already had a few fuzzes, but determined that over the course of the year I would acquire around 30 of the very best fuzzes available across the different fuzz families. My aim was to get the bulk of my research done in 2018 so I could move on to investigating other pedal genres - like say Glitch/Granular Synthesis/Micro Looping.

As it happens though - I got to twice as many fuzzes as intended in 2018, and have ...

Readers of this blog will know that I’m a huge fan of Sheldon’s first official True North Pedal - the superior Tweed Drive. In common with the new Rocky Mountain Fuzz both have great core tonalities with a significant amount of versatility and range on tap via 3 tone-shaping controls - Volume, Tone and Fuzz (Gain/Saturation) in this instance. Both pedals also have the rather fabulous tweed fabric-wrapped enclosures - the newer version fetchingly dyed black. I feel that this should ...

I have covered off a number of my favourite Summer NAMM pedals already - including the Boss 200 range, RC-10R and SY-1, the Fulltone OCD Ge, the REVV G2, the Spaceman Effects Gemini IV, and Walrus Audio Kangra for instance. And there’s a couple more surprise ones I will be posting as dedicated features very soon - so stay alert for those! In the wake of one of the best ever Winter NAMM’s it was clear that the Summer NAMM could never match that degree of innovation - in fact most of ...

I’ve actually been meaning to do this post for a while now - I’ve had several requests over the years to do a ’best of’ feature for Catalinbread - with some even wanting one specifically on delays - which actually only number 6 and therefore don’t quite merit a solo outing - although we’ll see. So this at last is that post - taking in the best of new and established, innovative and unique - across the 4 sub-categories - Foundation Overdrives | Delays and ...

It has to be said that Carl Martin - a long-standing Danish pedal-builder of high pro-gear repute - was starting to look somewhat fusty and old-fashioned there for a while. And while some brands would look to simply refresh their graphics and update things in a largely superficial manner - Carl Martin set to designing an entirely new compact enclosure for its Vintage Series of pedals.

The incumbent pedals were in rather uninteresting medium enclosures while the degree of innovation and...

I can’t recall exactly what the catalyst was to this article, but I’ve been considering versatile medium enclosure Big Muff style fuzzes a lot of late. I have 3 of the best of these already in constant rotation (Update 4 now actually!) - i.e. one momentarily replacing the other on the #19 slot of my pedal-chain - and alternating a whole lot with the PLL style fuzzes right at this moment.

In any case during the process of cycling the Demon Pedals Parvati, Toneczar Vault and ...

The Chase for a Gemini III has sort of been my White Whale really - as I’ve been on the case for several years now - but the going prices of the 2011 originals were just stratospherically ridiculous - in fact there are a couple on Ebay right now - ’Used!’ For $1,800 and $1,975 respectively! I feel those prices are going to come down somewhat significantly now though as the new version - albeit in a larger medium-vertical enclosure - has a notably superior feature set. Whenever...