With me being a pedal aficionado first and foremost - that’s obviously my main area of focus for this imminent show and the above pedal brand visual - while there is an equal amount of killer Synth brands present too - as listed below.

This London Synth & Pedal Expo is my good friend Paolo De Gregorio’s first UK Event - who always has a fantastic multi-brand Stompbox Exhibit Booth at the NAMM Shows - and has organised a series of events for several years now throughout the North ...

Another healthy selection - Modutility covering Modulation, Pitch and Utility pedal categories - for one of the strongest selection to date. Some of the pedals here are truly stellar, and I have a little over half here already in the collection.

I’m unlikely to ever get all the pedals featured here, but there are several already earmarked for acquisition in 2023 - with the Eventide H90 at the top of that list.

The ones I don’t yet own, or may never own even - include :

• Chase Bliss

So it’s that time of year again when I trawl through the releases over these past 12 months or so and endeavour to extract the pedal highlights of the year. This exercise is all about drawing a line in the sand and figuring out which pedals deserve to be on the notable side of the line.

Of course everything I publish on Guitar Pedal X is highly curated - those are my own particular preferences and choices, and those are the pedals that I like the look of. So everything that appears on ...

Readers have been asking me to do this rundown for a while now - although in terms of like-for-like comparison there’s quite a broad basis for what an ’Evolved Tone Enhancer’ is.

Traditionally boosts have always been seen to be tone enhancers - while the new paradigm means that it’s more of a combination of several different ’enhancements’, just being an Echoplex or Space Echo style preamp / boost is no longer enough - so for the purposes of this article you typically need 3 separate ...

When I first read the Atlas Compressor blurb it sounded like Source Audio had doubled down on the 3 Analog Circuit Crazy Tube Circuits Phi Golden Ratio V2 Multi-Compressor. If you scan through the text it really seems to indicate discrete component analog compression - but reading between the lines it soon becomes evident that this is modelling of said components, not the discrete circuitry itself.

So the early excitement faded a little, while this is still a hugely impressive achievement -...

NOTE - this article is too large (108 videos) to work properly on Mobile devices - make sure you view on Desktop or Laptop!

This is my largest ever article - and it will unlikely be repeated in this fashion - as this takes so long to compile - and the 108 Pedals / Videos included just take a little too long to load up on the screen. In any case it’s a pretty exhaustive run-down in rough order of preference of my favourite Compact Enclosure Pedals of Each Type.

For a few here there are ...

Source Audio’s new Zio is a rare fully analog pedal for them - where they’re much better known for their wide-ranging 56-bit processing One Series DSP Stereo Pedals. As soon as I saw the Zio, I was reminded of my JA Prism which kinda sorta does similar things as a Buffer, Boost, EQ and Preamp.

Controls - Output (+20dB), Circuit : JFET / Low-Cut / Studio / E-Plex, Tone : Bright / Med / Dark, Switch : Bypass / Mute.

The core of the Zio is 4 different tone-enhancing Circuits :

• JFET :

Since we have had 5 cool new and formidable Stereo Reverb pedals this year - it seems opportune to review the category and figure out which are the standout options and alternatives - past and present.

My own journey into Reverb started with the Strymon BigSky - which was my mainstay for a while, then Source Audio announced its new Dual-Channel Ventris and I was very keen on that - but that edition was very slow to materialise, and so I moved instead to Boss’s excellent RV-500 next.

The...

The 3 Pedal Challenge was in constant circulation last year on a variety of discussion groups, and I’ve kind of been biding my time in the hope I would have more options to choose from by now, but there has been no significant addition this year to unseat any of my established selections.

There are various ways to go about the 3 Pedal Challenge - where some individuals simply just select their 3 favourite pedals - without any particular rhyme or reason. While for me it’s a ...