I first featured the Old Blood Noise x Emily Hopkings Parting back on January 21st. All the demos were great, but I was massively put off by the overly cluttered nature of the artwork. Even in the early monochrome edition - that ultra busy design made it really hard to even look in the direction of the pedal - I imagine anyone on the spectrum would not have reacted well to that design. It kind of drowned out the functional ability of the pedal - and made it look far tricker to deploy than it ...

A super busy month - with plenty of highlights and heatwaves.

My house is finally cooling down as I write these last few observations - we’ve had around 10 days of oppressive heat now, and there’s another wave on the way at the end of this week - which makes for very difficult conditions to have sessions with said pedals.

We’re in the final consequence of global climate change now - with increasingly more extreme weather patterns occurring - alternately cold snaps, heatwaves, and torrential ...

So the mission here was to shrink down the White Whale V2 Tremo-Verb into a smaller, more compact and more pedalboard-friendly unit - while maintaining the full fidelity of the original large unit - obviously with a few less options and some slight differences, but all the essentials wholly intact!

And Christos has done a quite superb job here. There are smaller spring tank units available, but nothing in the All-Analog Tremo-Verb Category (see below for size comparisons).

The device is...

David has massively evolved his 2017 mini Deep Space Pulsar (DSP) into a monster interactive performance modulator which can absorb 2 separate instrument inputs, and/or a Mic - side-chaining one input against the other, and outputting in a variety of fashions including panning ping-pong stereo. It works brilliantly with just a single input too - but much of the magic happens when you double up on your inputs.

I was particularly enamoured with the interplay between the Rainger FX Snare Trap ...

May has been a little bit of strange month - lots of delays really, and waiting for pedals to land.

As inevitably happens most months - much was delayed this month, and I was unable to complete some of the larger articles - they will need to wait until next month, there’s certainly lots of projects in progress. Where new and imminent arrivals kind of scuppered several intended projects - hopefully they can be completed in June.

The first event I’m attending this month is tomorrow - as a micropub ...

I had kind of overlooked the Caroline Guitar Co. modulation pedals for a while, where the one that had always interested me the most was the Arigato Phaser - which took me a while to get to for whatever reason! I eventually landed that one near the start of this month!

I was so impressed with the Arigato - Phaser / Vibrato / Vibe that I decided that I should go for all 3 of the Caroline Modulation pedals - Arigato Phaser, Parabola Tremolo, and Somersault Lo-Fi Modulator.

One of my ...

A slightly uneventful month in many ways - just the one event - the excellent sophomore Leeds Pedal Show - where I ended up picking up 3 pedals.

Some killer releases during the month, with a strong final flurry to make up the 10 notable article highlights. I’ve been very busy all month - and plenty of work has gone into this as usual, while there was somehow fewer large-scale rundowns and marquee features - more of that next month for sure.

HIGHLIGHTS for APRIL :

[Click on Images for ...

It’s a little early to call, as I’ve only had this exceptional tremolo for a week or so now, but it’s one of those perfect executions with everything in the right place, and a really exceptional output profile. It may just be my favourite tremolo pedal to-date (#35!).

The complement of controls is just spot-on - that top row combination of Volume, Tone, Depth, and Speed, and then 8 different waveforms across 4 Modes, and with Tap-Tempo and Sub-divisions. You could argue that the only thing ...

For me - these Dealer special White Light editions - are some of the prettiest varieties Spaceman has released to-date - with the white-out / snow-blind livery and striking cyan / teal LED’s - just gorgeous. I was missing the Atlas IV and Apollo VIIb - and Cream City Music and Axe and You Shall Receive were enormously helpful in getting those shipped to me in short order. I then spotted that my friend Scott at Axe and You Shall Receive also had a White Light Rumblefuzz II remaining - and I just...