Around the same time last year as Luca Romanelli announced the retirement of Mastro Valvola, my good friend Mike Vickery announced that his Vick Audio would cease pedal production too. Not many know that Mike was my Big Muff Mentor really, and I really got the full grasp on what distinguished one Big Muff variety from another - via a series of highly involved chats with Mike back in 2020.

Mike is / was one of the very best producers of Big Muff style fuzzes - with the general acceptance ...

As mentioned previously - I meant to feature Lastgasp Art Laboratories (LAL / Lastgasp) quite a while back, but access to pedals from the UK has been rather limited, and most of these therefore fairly hard to come by! I detailed how there were only two properly active current dealers that had most of the range in stock - my good friend Andy Ebsen’s Effekt Boutique in Germany, and Perfect Circuit in the USA. I also was instrumental in getting Joe’s Pedals’ Joe Light to connect with Lastgasp’s ...

There are a few UK brands that have become pretty well associated / identified with this style of straight-lines point-to-point circuit wiring. Probably most famously currently are Reeves Electro and NRG Effects, while there are also some notable, slightly more under the radar grass-roots brands out there like Elephant Pedals, and indeed The Sound Boutique as featured here.

Mo Yassine’s London-based The Sound Boutique is both a highly curated pedal boutique and a pedal builder with its own ...

So scanning through this month it seems to have been mostly about Guitar / Pedal Shows, Japanese Pedals, and Pedals Delayed and Missing in the Post!

The Guitar Shows have been pretty fast and furious for March - with two of the most significant ones of the year, along with a fledgling grassroots one : The Guitar Show (Cranmore Park - Birmingham / Shirley), London Synth & Pedal Expo (Studio 9294, Hackney Wick, London), The Alternative Guitar Show (The Fighting Cocks, Kingston).

I of ...

We’re living in interesting times - where the more classic Germanium Transistors have almost all been used up already. JAM Pedals’ Fuzz Phrase used to be a purple suede-wrapped Custom Shop Edition loaded with Germanium CV7003 variants - which are military spec equivalents to OC44. While those were always is short supply and stocks eventually ran out!

It turns out that Jimi Hendrix favoured the Silicon variety of Fuzz Face - which for many is just as good as or even preferable to the ...

I have quite a number of Super Fuzzes in the collection by now - and this Lastgasp Art Laboratories variant is another wonderful take on that format - with some quite distinct circuit differences - but most importantly it has all the flavour - and those fantastic blooming and percolating waves of harmonic fuzz.

The circuit topology is somewhat different to the norm - being composed of a mix of C1815 Transistors and JRC4558DD opamp. I’m not particularly familiar with the C1815’s, but ...

Joe Halliday’s latest ShipWreck FuzzStortion has been through quite the development journey. Initially based on the request of a friend to make a Higher Gain HSE pedal. It combines a JFET preamp section with some beautifully amp- and fuzz-like dynamics and characteristics - and produces rather exceptional long singing sustain.

It’s basically a discrete transistor style distortion - with an initial JFET preamp section to deliver more organic feel under the fingers. Then it hits something ...

This article was actually inspired by the recent Fjord Fuzz SOL Fuzz-Vibe feature - where I got to thinking about extended range Fuzz Face style pedals. To my memory there is only the Carl Martin Purple Moon and Fjord Fuzz SOL in that compact Fuzz-Vibe format. I then recalled the Keeley Electronics Monterey - but realised there weren’t a whole lot of pedals in the extended format category - for Fuzz-Vibes - so I expanded the remit to cover ’Fuzz Face+’ pedals - essentially expanded feature set ...

The SOL Fuzz-Vibe is a very personal pedal - both for Daniel himself, and all Fjord-dwelling Scandinavians in particular. In those jagged fjords the sun never manages to rise far enough above those craggy peaks through the depths of winter (which in some parts can be almost half the year!) - the first hint of spring is the sun finally cresting those fjord peaks and releasing the land from darkness. We Icelanders call this fabulous natural phenomenon ’Sólarkaffi’ - when the first appearance of ...