I’ve long had a Vox AC30 style pedal on the board - slot #19 nowadays - where the Brian May Queen sound is one of the key tones in my arsenal. Not all those Voxy pedals are equal by any means - in fact a lot of them don’t quite quite reach the Top-Boosted Heights you need to cover Brian’s more searing riffs and solos. I’ve long sought out the perfect pedal to replicate those tones - and while I’ve come close on a number of occasions - I’ve never quite totally nailed it with just the one pedal -...

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 ...

So I’ve finally hit the trigger on a Tanabe Zenkudo - Tanabe-San’s humbucker-optimised Dumble Drive variant (Dumkudo is the one for Single Coils). I thought I had snagged one of these on Ebay a few weeks back, but the seller had gotten mixed up between Dumkudo and Zenkudo - and the one he had in stock was actually the former - which is generally much more available out there in the wild than the Zenkudo variety.

I had kind of been putting this off, as I knew that this would likely be the ...

So this is the second of this series - where the first was more about the uniqueness of the enclosure shape - more structural really - covering the overall form factor. While this edition is more about ’Trade Dress’ or the Memorability of the Aesthetics - style of graphics, consistency of theme, and consistency of control topology - doing something in a consistently measurable way that makes that pedal instantly recognisable from afar as belonging to a certain single brand.

So this one is ...

This article was originally suggested by my now good friend Henry Kaiser - leading guitar and guitar effects experimentalist and prolific producer and recording artist. He’s been a long-term friend of Toshihiko Tanabe - of Tanabe.TV fame and thought I should do one of my pedal roundups on Japanese Boutique Pedal Builders.

I had long intended to do a feature on Japanese Pedal Makers - but could not decide on the context or format - as there are so many notable brands. Upon Henry’s suggestion...

I had been meaning to do this exercise for quite some time - and have had a number of readers chasing me up about it - since my last Dumble Style Pedal overview was way back in February of 2019, and where I listed my then 9 favourite candidates - including three that I owned. This time around I’ve thrown 18 hats into the ring or twice as many as the last roundup.

The delay occurred  in part because I was waiting for my friend Brian Mena to officially launch his V2 Dumbstruck pedal - which ...

This article is prompted chiefly by my fairly recent acquisition of the Demon Pedals Kondo Shifuku D-Style Overdrive - which brings my tally of Dumble style drives to three - or 7 kind of, depending on how you characterise these things. The very first Dumble Style pedal I acquired was the Mad Professor Simble - which I still love, but substituted eventually with the more versatile Wampler Euphoria. While both those are excellent conveyors of the kind of Dumble tones I was looking for - the ...

Newer feature [here]

Unless you have a ready spare £50,000 - £100,000 - few of us will ever own a genuine Alexander Dumble Overdrive Special amp - of which only around 300 were built. There are various sound-alike / clone amps to a degree - like the Fuchs Overdrive Supreme (c £2,000) or Two Rocks TS1 (c £4,400), yet we pedal aficionados prefer to reproduce such tone in more compact enclosures. To be wholly circumspect here, each of the amps mentioned have a ...