’These Go To 11’ is one of the select Dealers whose site I regularly check out each and every week, and where I first encountered DanDrive pedals in late 2018, before connecting directly with Dan Querner himself in early 2019. I had a number of dialogues with Dan at the time, while he made me edit most of the interesting details out of that article - both his background and career, and his methodology, and unique way with electronics. Nearly all the salient details got removed - and we ended up...

At one stage - for a circa 2 year period Sof at Expresso FX was one of my very best friends - and I used to speak to him regularly - every couple of weeks or so. In that period I acquired 6 of his best, and some of those still remain as enduring classics to this day - while one of them has been further improved with an additional Low-Cut filter Knob over the two variants I have of that type.

Sof became distant during Covid - and despite several attempts, I’ve been unable to reestablish that...

So this is a cool recent project from Vox - which purports to be Vintage-inspired and Germanium sounding - but utilising BC108 vintage silicon metal can transistors.

Interestingly the BC108 is the more aggressive Type II Fuzz Face variant, where it’s typically the Type III BC183 or 2N3904 transistor that is the most Germanium sound-alike one.

Evidently Vox have used a supporting cast of components to add the more softer Germanium style of grit to what is a fairly distinct and high gain ...

New Pedals in the Class of 2025 Pedal-Chain Snapshot = 41

[OCTOBER]  = 9

[NOVEMBER] = 6

[MARCH] = 5

[SEPTEMBER] = 5

[AUGUST] = 4

[JANUARY] = 3

[FEBRUARY]  = 3

[APRIL] = 2

[JUNE] = 2

[MAY] = 1

[JULY] = 1

[A-Z by Brand]

1. Becos FX CompIQ Pro Yuna Soft Knee Blackmer VCA Studio Style Compressor [SEPTEMBER]
2. Blue Colander Grimrobe Dual Cascaded Super Rat [OCTOBER]
3. Blue FX Devices Fuzz Fields Ultimate Modulated Fuzz [SEPTEMBER]
4. Boss RT-2 Rotary Ensemble Leslie / Rotary Speaker

Probably the strongest selection of the year - each one of these is amazing and sounds killer. But then agin similar was true of the Overdrives. I’m very much a fuzz fanatic - so his selection has to take the edge - what a selection!

This selection includes 3 from EarthQuaker Devices, 2 from Drunk Beaver, 2 from Fjord Fuzz, and 2 from ThorpyFX.

It also includes the likely pedal of the year - within a selection of 10 award winners here - these are so good - I could have labelled even ...

My close association with Thorpy started back in late September of 2018 - at the now defunct Olympia UK Guitar Show. He was the first pedal maker I reached out to, and the first I connected with.

Since then ThorpyFX Pedals have become my 3rd most populous selection after Boss and Drunk Beaver. Those 3 brands alone contribute over 200 pedals to my reference collection!

The fact that I’m now at 31 ThorpyFX Pedals is a major milestone - and features every mainline MKII pedal Thorpy has made. ...

This has turned out to be something of a Thorpy month! - following on from the recent Manson Supermassive Black Fuzz and 3 Thorpy acquisitions this month - indeed the Supermassive is also engineered by Thorpy!

I thought I should do a quick retrospective of pedals and projects that Thorpy has been involved in.

I selected my favourite pedal from those 4 brands (some singular options!) :

• Redbeard Effects : Bearded Vulture Direct Drive with Octave
• Victory Amps : V1 The Jack Guthrie

What we have here is an incredibly potent fuzz - consisting of 3 x OpAmps, 3 x Silicon Transistors, and 2 x Blue LEDs - so the core fuzz flavour is already immense and richly textured - very much ’Supermassive’ in its output. And you then have an impressively powerful tone stack essentially - consisting of an expansive Filter [Warp] (350Hz > 5kHz) used in tandem with a wide-ranging ’Q’ bandwidth control [Dimension]. So essentially a sort of semi-parametric EQ - where you set your chosen ...

October was a super busy month - one of the busiest ever - with such a scope and scale and body of work covered - I’m quite shattered as a result!

We had of the penultimate Events of the year :

• The 2nd Woking Boutique Guitar Show
• Kempton Park London International Guitar Show

And around one dozen key posts  as below also :

• Letter from Dr.No
• Teaching Machines FuzzBillion Component Combinations Wheels Gain-Shaper
• Hangman fx DAGG’R Dynamic Auto-Gain/Gate Mighty Morphing Gain-Ramper