We’ve had a number of pedals released into Catalinbread’s Belle Epoch Tape Echo family - starting with the original 2015 compact edition. The Deluxe edition arrived 2 years later, and and 2 years after that we had a large-format Epoch Pre - Preamp/Buffer, which is alas discontinued now.

In fact 2024 kind of sees something of a replacement for that Epoch Pre - in the shape of the 4-controls Epoch Bias - Preamp/Bias pedal.

The range currently consists of 5 pedals - One large DLX, a mini, ...

The ALABS Audio Pedals were so successful over the Christmas / New Year period - that they were sold out for a while. So I thought it prudent to pause the action until ALABS were back in sync with the demand.

The TimeSlip is my second-favourite of the quartet and shares Cetus’s perfect mix of algorithms - mixing up classic and more traditional flavours with some more intriguing and unusual modern and futuristics ones. I really love this pedal in particular for superb sweep of algorithms - ...

I love that Gamechanger Audio exists and is so free and forward looking in its innovation - continuously delivering new and distinct ideas into the world of pedals. They certainly make very interesting form factors, while their pioneering spirit often kind of ignores the more practical aspects of day-to-day pedalboard management. All their units are larger than the norms - often quite substantially - which makes those pedals difficult to accommodate on a typical board. And those considerations ...

The final arrangement for the year - all the pedals that impressed the most!

And so to the final category - where competition is extremely fierce this year. No doubt some of your favourites will have missed the cut here - but hopefully this selection is fully representative of the best of the year. Obvious I lean more towards immersive stereo effects - mono doesn’t really do it for me so much - while there is a smattering of mono pedals in here too. Price, format, versatility and practicality - everything counts!

Of the 23 featured in the selection - I own around ...

So Anasounds first released their 3-knob analog-voiced delay pedal back in 2015. It rose quickly to become their best-selling pedal - and remains so to this day. One of the trickiest thing you can do - as vouched for by none other than Joshua Heath Scott - is to create a tap-tempo function for an analog style / or PT2399 delay. In fact it took Anasounds’ engineers 3 years to perfect - to the most exacting of standards. And the results of said exercise is not just the 6 control knobs, twin ...

I’m really proud to be supporting a small fledgling audio products brand based in Singapore - which has only been around for a couple of years or so, and was originally known for making studio quality Microphones, Wooden Earcup Headphones and Mixing Consoles. ALABS Audio’s Jinbo Hui reached out to me back in September - to ask if I would want to support the launch of their new Adam Adventures Series pedal range - and I of course said I needed to be properly impressed by those pedals for me to ...

I’ve obviously featured the Pico POG previously as the first in this particular series / range to be released - where we now have 9 fully formed candidates - 7 mini editions of EHX Classics - and 2 brand new formats - the Rerun Tape Delay, and Triboro Overdrive + Distortion + Fuzz pedal - all DSP types.

These are somewhat streamlined in feature sets mostly compared to their Nano / Compact equivalent forebears - while some here actually have a little more to them - including the Pitch Fork, ...

Crazy Tube Circuits’ Christos Ntaifotis is the master of miniaturisation - and he’s achieved a similar marvel of engineering here as he did with his Phi Golden Ratio Compressor - with the key difference being that the compressor was an all-analog 3-in-1 confection, while there was no way you would be able to fit 3 Analog modulations, 2 delays, and 6 reverbs into a compact enclosure any other way - DSP is the only vehicle that can make that possible.

And Chris here has settled on just the ...