I apologise for being a little late with this - while I was waiting for proper official release references to materialise - and they still haven’t - so we don’t have the full specs necessarily. What we do know is that it’s a touch smaller than the original - and while not really properly a stompbox as such it can still be sort of deployed in that pedalboard manner.

It’s actually quite a bit more practical than I thought it would be - but I don’t have the final dimensions yet. The top visual...

While the more typical and specialist guitar / luthier brands seems to be back in full force - there are seemingly somewhat fewer pedal brands featuring in this year’s Birmingham Guitar Show - in particular compared to the Last Show on February of 2020 - which had the record amount for that roster.

Some of the big brands are missing, including Boss - which on the back of some really strong releases could have capitalised on those great recent introductions to its range. They have always had...

Reader Charles H requested that I do a roundup of Clean Blend Overdrives - which resulted in the following selection. Most Bass Overdrives have Clean-Blend by default - while all the ones I have selected here are more specifically Guitar Overdrives. I personally don’t find myself needing to use Clean Blend so much - but I can totally understand why so many players find this functionality useful or even essential. The Blend knob is variously labelled Blend, Clean, Dry and Mix. I’ve tried to ...

Update! This feature inspired 7 further articles - Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Sky Blue and Purple.

This feature was inspired by a couple of different events - firstly ongoing conversations I have been having with Fjord Fuzz’s Daniel Thornhill about the colour of LEDs for different pedal types, and secondly an odd Q&A episode of That Pedal Show where Dan was trying to match a pedal to the colour of his yellow trousers or pants as some of you like to call them.

I turned my mind...

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, ...

Your immediate reaction to the above visual may well be - where’s the bleedin’ Fulltone OCD in all of this - well that’s all part of the narrative - as follows. When I got into guitar again a few years back, there were all manner of overdrives and drives that were deemed to be essential for any serious electric guitar player - and I took to acquiring and comparing those - which led to my ’12 Degrees of Saturation’ Methodology.

Much of this was just ...

There have been 3 legendary analogue tape-style delay engines that everyone agrees on:

• Binson Echorec 2 (1961-79)
• Maestro Echoplex EP-3 (1970 - 1991)
• Roland RE-201 Space Echo (1974 - 1990)

All those 3 have a significant influence and impact on many if not most of those featured here - which are either direct simulations of those former classics, or pay some sort of lip-service to them. T-Rex have a full-size faithful modern reproduction of the Echorec in the works which is imminent for ...

This quest originally started with my considering various Octave Fuzz pedals - in fact if you look up ’Octave’ on a typical guitar store, the majority of pedals revealed are of the fuzz type. I spent long and hard considering exactly which pedal to get, and if it should be the Hendrix octave up, octave down or in both directions. Having considered everything on offer in that category, I decided that I would probably be better off getting a fully stand-alone octave pedal which I ...

I must confess that I have thus far not paid sufficient mind to the exact power needs of my aforementioned fairly lengthy pedal chain (see Pedal Chain Delight). In fact I use 6 different power-supplies and probably too much daisy-chaining at the moment. Improbably though, my chain is still remarkably noise-free (perhaps not totally 100%), but I pretty much know where it could do with improvements.

A key problem is that decent, properly isolated power supplies are relatively dear, and I ...