The following excerpt is adapted from Josh Scott's forward for Art of the Stompbox by Chris Cassone.

The first guitar pedals I ever encountered were sitting in a glass case at Russellville Pawn on the main highway that cut through the center of my small Alabama town. They changed my life.

I was probably 15, and there they were – a handful of lovingly used stompboxes with price tags hanging on those classic paper tags with a single string tied around the knobs. What struck me wasn't their promise of sonic transformation – I barely understood what they did. It was how completely different they were from each other.

A Zoom 505 with its digital display and plastic housing looked like a piece of consumer electronics, something that belonged next to a Nintendo or a calculator. But the scratched-up BOSS pedal sitting next to it had the solid, purposeful presence of a craftsman's tool – something my dad might pick up at the hardware store because he had work to get done.

Even then, I sensed that these visual differences meant something. The brands weren't just competing on features or price; they were making completely different statements about what a guitar pedal should be, who should use it, and how seriously you should consider the aesthetic.

Decades later, as both a pedal builder and a student of guitar culture, I've come to realize that this moment in that pawn shop captured something essential about the relationship between sound and sight in our instrument's evolution. We don't just hear our pedals – we live with them, arrange them, obsess over them, and yes, judge them by their covers.

That visual language has never been more diverse or sophisticated. Every pedal is a collaboration between sound and sight, between engineer and artist, between maker and musician. In an era when anyone can build a circuit, it's often the visual language that separates the memorable from the forgettable, the iconic from the ignored.

The guitar pedal occupies a unique space in industrial design – simultaneously utilitarian and expressive, mass-produced yet personal. These are objects designed to be stepped on, yet many never touch the floor. They're tools for making music, but they're also statements about who we are as players and what we value as artists.

I've always believed that the best pedal designs aren't decorations applied to functional objects – they're integral expressions of the musical philosophy contained within.

When Ivor Arbiter made his Fuzz Face smile, when Bill Finnegan chose the perfect shade of gold for his Klon, when BOSS created their color-coded universe, they weren't just making pedals look different. They were creating visual languages that would become part of how we understand and relate to our instruments.

In my own company's evolution from hand-stamped boxes to printed graphics, I've learned that every design choice – from the thickness of a line to the placement of a logo – either adds to or subtracts from this musical conversation. The best pedal art doesn't just catch your eye; it becomes part of your sound in ways you might not even consciously realize.

Pedals are not mere effects processors but artifacts of creative intent. In the world of guitar effects, beauty and function aren't opposing forces – they're partners in the endless pursuit of the perfect sound.

• Art of the Stompbox: Celebrating The Visual Artistry of Effects Pedals features 300 color photographs from 60 pedal makers across 18 countries, with a foreword by Josh Scott of JHS Pedals and a cover testimonial from the late Ace Frehley of KISS. It's available now via Amazon.

Today is Tuesday. I got home on Sunday from a trip to San Francisco with my guitar and pedals, where I opened for Spike and the Gimmie Gimmes at The Kilowatt city venue. It was fabulous.

But while my pedal bag included a PolyTune, OCD and reverb, all I really needed was my beloved Vox wah-wah. Hello, my name is Eva Walker. I'm a wah-wah addict, and this is my story.

I remember my first wah-wah fondly. I didn’t buy it – it was gifted to me by an ex. But no matter the source, I marveled that I could manipulate my guitar’s natural tone with a simple flex or point of my foot. As a former dancer (tap and ballet) I could put my training to good use.

For me, the wah-wah is single-handedly the greatest, most recognizable guitar sound. The alternation between high and low frequency isn’t just a cool effect – it’s power! It’s the ability to influence the listener from sounding like a temper tantrum from my two-year-old daughter to the teacher on Charlie Brown giving a lecture.

What I love most is that it sounds like it could be talking or crying. Whenever I hear a player using it, I wonder: are they speaking or are they weeping?

One of my favorite weeping wah-wah songs is Maggot Brain by Funkadelic. As some guitar-heads know, George Clinton told Eddie Hazel to play the lead solo as if his mother just died. Mission accomplished!

Although I think it’s more that the Strat’s mother just died and Funkadelic are the pallbearers. Sometimes I can’t listen to the whole 10-minute song without feeling overly emotional.

The weeping wah-wah features prominently in plenty of songs from the 1960s and ’70s. Perhaps most famously is Voodoo Child (Slight Return) by Jimi Hendrix; he sounds like he’s wailing, screaming and even begging. Somehow, though, it’s just two tones on a seesaw.

As for that delightful talking wah-wah, players know that making a guitar talk isn’t the most difficult thing in the world. The talent is in how a player puts emotion into that language. One of my favorite examples is What I Am by Edie Brickell and the New Bohemians.

The guitar practically raps – clean, calm and consistent, the energy builds as it makes its final point. Kenny Withrow knows how to make his guitar talk. It’s like he gave it a public speaking class; he shows real diction and dexterity.

Another great example is Tell Me Something Good by Rufus and Chaka Khan. It’s as if Chaka Khan is Chuck D and the lead guitar is Flava Flav – yes, that’s the hype wah! The guitar offers two standout features that could carry the track on their own, yet they prove to be complimentary in the background; the peanut gallery.

More of my favorite wah-wah comes in 1970s Afrorock songs from areas like Nigeria and Zambia. W.I.T.C.H, Chrissy Zebby Tembo and the Ngozi Family kill me. Tracks like Coffin Maker and Troublemaker are Zamrock staples that heavily stand on the fuzzy wah-wah.

The recordings at times even sound cheap or low quality – muffled. But it’s the talent and the choices made by the musicians that make them some of the best recordings I’ve ever heard, where the wah-wah displays rawness, resilience and frustration from civil wars and economic struggle.

Another example is Blacky Joe from the Nigerian band PRO (People’s Rock Outfit). The tune puts me in the shoes of the titular Joe, who’s burnt all his bridges in town. He’s a misfit, constantly in shady situations. The guitar solo at the end could easily be Joe running away or begging for his life. It’s the sound of a defenseless man.

The best compliment I’ve ever gotten came from a man in New York. I’d just come off stage after an hour with my favorite pedal. “Wow!” he said. “You’re like Jimi Hendrix but with a better ass!”

I’m pretty sure I hugged him. Hey, addicts have to stick together.

What is it?

With the PR for its new drop-tuning pedal, the Chug Capo, Ola Englund’s Solar is coming out of the traps with confidence and at least two potential aces up its sleeve.

The pedal’s shtick is simple: It pitches the entire guitar signal by a set number of semitones – stretching up and down one octave each – and does so, the firm reckons, with a greater clarity than ever before. Yet many other pedals, like the long-adored DigiTech Drop, the new and impressive challenger, the Boss XS series, aren’t going to take such hype lightly. The Chug Capo can’t be deemed the new gold standard without winning a fight or two first.

Chiefly, Solar points to two standout factors that go in its favor. Firstly, the “digital bi-directional capo” pedal promises the lowest-latency performance, roughly half that of the other big players. That means players can chug to their heart’s content without it feeling like it’s dragging; it might make them forget the signal has been pitched altogether.

Secondly, there’s talk of retaining "sonic integrity" even with the shifting at its most extreme. That means full, detailed note clarity with single notes and chords. The Boss XS-100 proved remarkable at this; with its artifact-free shifting, it made it one of 2025’s most impressive pedals. The bar is high.

The overarching idea from Solar here is that this pedal could feasibly replace the need to gig with multiple guitars, as it can handle tuning changes in a flash and it also benefits from a preset slot. At the same time, a Mix dial also lets it double as an octaver. It could become a real cuckoo piece of gear.

Lastly, there’s also the option of plugging in a non-latching switch, which is not included, and would need to be purchased from a third party. The Boss FS-5U and the Harley Benton Tap Tempo Switch have both been confirmed as compatible.

So then, the Solar Chug Capo is a pretty straightforward design, and its makers are talking a big game. But how does it fare against the pedals it claims to be ready to slay?

Specs

• Price: $249 (approx £186/€217)
• Type: Pitch shifter and octaver pedal
• Controls: Pitch +/-, mix, Fav, on/off footswitch
• Connectivity: 1/4" inputs, outputs, 3.5mm non-latching switch input, 9V DC, USB-C
• Power: DC 9V, 180mA
• Dimensions: 120mm x 70mm (4.72 x 2.75 Inches)
• Contact: Solar Guitars

Build quality ★★★★½

The pedal is an absolute tank. Coming in a little boxier than your average Boss pedal, it should sit on most pedalboards with little fuss, and honestly feels like it could survive a nuclear holocaust and still be able to down-tune the world’s last-ever electric guitar. Its metal face makes it clear what kind of guitar playing it’s aimed at – even if I’ve never been a fan of how on-the-nose Solar is with the cliché metal aesthetic – and its four interface buttons and sole footswitch are equally rock-solid.

Curiously, it boots up at -2 by default. I find it a shame that it doesn’t recall the last setting used, but it’s an easy fix nevertheless.

Meanwhile, the on light glows red when the pedal is engaged. There are no color discrepancies between up and down shifts, but it glows blue when the Mix mode is on.

Still, its lack of MIDI connectivity harms its compatibility in modern rigs. It’s built to either be on or off throughout a song, but it feels like an oversight all the same.

Usability and features ★★★★☆

The Chug Capo's interface is as simple as it gets, and that works in its favor. The screen is bright and clear, with arrows on either side for pitching the signal up and down. A dot appears above the Mix and Fav mini switches to indicate when they’re engaged, and on the darkest stages, visibility should be no issue.

Pressing the Mix button turns it into octaver mode, blending the dry and pitched signals. Holding the switch down for around four seconds displays a number between 1 and 99, which is the percentage of the pitched signal that’s audible. The higher the number, the drier the signal I get. Conveniently, it defaults to a 50/50 split, unless I’m recalling a preset.

Speaking of which, the Fav button instantly brings up a saved setting, and a new favorite can be saved by holding the button down for 4 seconds again. It’s a doddle to do. However, given that Englund and Solar see this as a trusty gigging companion, I think this feature should have been taken further. There is only one preset slot, so for sets where more than one shift is needed, I’d need to squat down and dial everything in manually. Nevertheless, having presets at all is still a feature the compact competition of the Boss XS-1 and DigiTech Drop don't offer.

Granted, hitting the Fav button a second time restores the pedal to its last setting, including whether Mix is on or off and its percentage. That means there are, in essence, two settings you have access to, which does give its practicality a shot in the arm – even if the non-preset mode will need to be freshly dialed in every time I boot up the pedal. But there’s another issue, too.

I feel the Mix and/or Fav buttons could have benefited from being footswitches. There are feasibility issues here, of course, with Solar wanting to keep the pedal as small as possible. But even the smallest of feet are going to have issues trying to hit any of those buttons on the fly, while not simultaneously hitting one of the arrows. Of course, this is where the extra non-latching switch comes in, connecting via a ¼” to 3.5mm cable handily provided in the box. I can confirm the Boss FS-5U works a treat, but it also increases the pedal’s surface area and, in fixing one operational problem, causes clunky problems of its own.

Another feature Englund is very happy about is how fast the pedal turns on/off, and does so without any weird glitches. Bashing the footswitch repeatedly confirmed that, which is great for peace of mind when making changes mid-song.

Sounds ★★★★☆

In Englund’s own words, the pedal has been created to satisfy his need for “something fast, something tight, and something specifically made for metal rhythm playing,” and so it only seems fair that that’s the benchmark the pedal is put up against.

When tracking fast, aggressively picked riffs, the pedal does its duties with aplomb, and it’s easy to forget that the guitar is actually pitched at times, given the speed of its response and how smooth it handles riffs. Even pinch harmonics squeal with clarity and aren’t smeared with weird glitches.

It’s a similar deal for chords; they don’t get too mushy; they don’t sound warped, and only when making more extreme shifts – +/-7 is where imperfections start to arise – are chords marred by a sense of artificiality. It’s all very impressive, and honestly, even in 2026, expecting an extreme pitch jump to be executed flawlessly feels unrealistic.

Solar forewarns players that “for Solos, some digital artifact is unavoidable and audible as in all pitch manipulators, but the tone remains faithful to the source.” This is very much the case, and, in a shootout with the Boss XS-100 and DigiTech Drop, playing the same Gojira-inspired aggressive metal riff through -2, -4, -8, and -12 shifts, the Solar wins out in terms of tone preservation. There is a minor signal loss and a little of the life sucked out of the Boss, while the DigiTech falls just behind that. The differences, I must add, aren’t night and day, but it’s clear that in moments like this, I am finding that Solar can walk as well as it talks.

However, the tone-sapping is avoided by compressing the pitched signal; it’s essentially trying to pep the signal back up after applying the effect. While that means it really does excel when playing heavy riffs, the compression is far more noticeable with clean tones. Here, the Boss is the outright winner, perhaps alluding to the fact that the Boss is meant to be a catch-all in terms of genres and styles, while this is an area that isn’t the Chug Capo’s strong suit. It adds a little too much grit to the clean tone for my liking, as it endeavors to prevent the signal from losing too much character.

As for solos, I’d go one step further than Solar’s advice. Where possible, disengage the effect and shift the pitch manually, perhaps only relying on it if there are open-string passages that are vital. It keeps things pure; the Chug Capo is meant to be a rhythm machine above all else.

Again, the differences between the three pedals are negligible, but if you’re reading this with very specific uses of the pedal in mind, they are really important aspects to consider. If, like I imagine I would, you need a pedal to go between D and C standard at the press of a button during a metal show, the Solar edges the Boss. And that surprised me, because the Boss is exceptional.

But for more universal applications, I fear Solar’s quest to make it the ultimate chugger means Boss takes the crown for its versatility. If metal rhythms aren’t your only usage, the Boss suddenly becomes way more viable.

It’s only around +/- 7, and beyond that I start to feel the pedal show its weaknesses, but that’s common across its competitors, too – it’s a big jump; there are always going to be side effects. For anything less, I’d happily use this over bringing an extra guitar to a gig, and the pitched tones are virtually indistinguishable from the non-pitched tones with regard to the cleanliness and purity of the effect in that first quartet of semitone shifts. To that end, the Solar can hold its head high. For one-track metal rhythm usage, this pedal will absolutely be a godsend for so many gigging riffers.

Verdict

Verdict: ★★★★☆

The Chug Capo does exactly what it says on the tin when it comes to standing as a potential replacement for a second guitar for gigging metal bands. When shifting the signal by up to seven semitones, my tone doesn’t suffer; chords ring out fully, fast runs are tracked with ease. Even pinch harmonics remain clear and artifact-free.

But, ultimately, it’s a pedal designed for metal guitarists. For more universal uses, especially in lower-gain and clean settings, the Boss XS-100 beats it, but not by much.

The fact it only has one preset slot, and that the Mix dial – which turns it into an octaver – isn’t overly accessible on the fly, lets it down a little, but for metal guitar pitch shifts on the fly, I feel Solar’s big talk isn't hyperbole.

Guitar World’s verdict: Designed to be the ultimate pitch-shifting pedal for metal rhythm guitar playing, the Chug Capo aces the test with its shifts up to +/-7 semitones artifact-free, while also retaining the original tone and handling fast passages and chords comfortably. But it has also painted itself into a corner, away from high-gain settings; its inherent compression becomes apparent, and I feel that a few quality-of-life features have been overlooked. It isn’t the undisputed king, but it certainly deserves a place in the castle’s keep.

Also try

Hands-on videos

Solar

Attila Voros

Brackley-based effects maker ThorpyFX has been in business for well over a decade now and its distinctive high-sided pedals have deservedly won a slew of awards.

Until now, the pedals have typically had military styling (founder Adrian Thorpe was in the British Army for many years), and though not all players will grasp the Cold War symbolism of, say, the Peacekeeper or the ER-2, to use but two examples, there was no mistaking the etched-crosshair motif of the company’s debut overdrive, the Marshall-like Gunshot.

More recently, however, as world events have taken a darker turn, ThorpyFX has broadened its visual and sonic identity with two pedals that depart from the bellicose script. The Hanami fuzz, launched last year, took its inspiration from Japanese cherry blossom season.

Now the Kudu, named after a large South African antelope, continues the nature‑derived theme. The pedal took shape after a chance gift from a fellow designer Dan Coggins, inspiring Adrian to create a highly versatile overdrive. We sit down with the company’s namesake and founder to find out more…

The new Hanami and now Kudu pedals are a bit of a departure from what’s gone before, at least visually.

Yes, it’s been a bit of a wholesale change, really. We like to listen to customers generally, and whenever we’ve felt that the swell of brown noise reached a certain crescendo, we’ve always made changes.

So when people were saying the first petals we ever brought out were a little bit too big, we shrunk them down. And when people were saying they couldn’t see the controls because the metal was too shiny, we moved it to black anodised aluminium.

And as a small company, these are big changes and it costs lots of money and it takes time to try to mitigate the sheer cost of doing these things. We then looked at our range and went, ‘Well, we could invest in several bits of equipment, and we could utilise our tools to essentially allow us to buy product that’s blank and then customise it for this specific pedal.’

So we invested 100 grand in lasers, UV printers and 3D printers and jigs and stuff like that. What that’s enabled us to do is almost go back to my roots, so I can do custom one-offs, I can do small runs, I can do full main runs, and the base enclosure stays the same – but we just apply custom artwork and we have full control over that process.

So it’s a bit of a business decision but also a creative decision as well. It took a bit of time, but it’s panned out quite nicely and it’s also allowed us to, not branch away from the military thing, but tone it down a little bit – and that’s a personal choice as well. I have a background in the military. I’m not a warmonger, as I have been called by some, and I believe I operate for peace and have good moral compass.

But I wanted to change things up a bit and so we’ve done a few things that have stepped away from the military aesthetic. Hanami was the first one, then The J, and now the Kudu. And as we move forward, we’re just sort of toning things down a little bit, art-wise, to appeal to a broader audience.

And you know what? At some point we’ll do full on Custom Shop stuff. We have it in the glide path that we’re working towards, and I’ve done many things already for people, which was fun. I’m glad we can do it because creative freedom brings quite a lot of joy.

How did this new Kudu overdrive pedal come into being?

I feel a bit guilty about the Kudu in some ways [laughs]. Dan [Coggins], my erstwhile analogue designer, gifted me a present [of a pedal he had made] at Christmas of 2024 because I was a bit down – I’d just lost my parents and [everything] was shit, if I’m honest. But he cheered me right up. Because as much I design pedals, I really like them – I like everyone else’s pedals.

Dan said, ‘I’d been asked to do this for someone and when I’d finished I liked it so much I thought I’d make you one because you like Marshall amps.’ Essentially, it was an MXR Distortion+ with quite a few modifications to it.

Even though the Distortion+ does work well with Marshall‑style amps, this works so much better. And so I use it with a Soldano and I use it with a Cornford, and [you could] use it with all these different style amps.

I was thinking, ‘This is amazing, it just works with everything’ – it’s a bit simple because it’s just got Level and Drive. So we had this back and forth together and a few months later, Dan said, ‘I was thinking about your comment about simplicity.’ Dan knows what I want with stuff and he turned around and said, ‘So I’ve sketched this out and it takes that concept of making things better and working well with everything and enhancing the thing that you’re playing into.’

He explained that this would need to come from a wider field – so it’s got more EQ, it’s got more clipping options, the gain control is more flexible, and the tone control is not a true tone control; it adds presence and treble, so it’s more of a ‘bite’.

And the control’s actually called Bite because, depending on your amp, it cuts through a certain way. He just drew this schematic out from me and I was like, ‘Oh, wow. Now I’ve definitely got to lay this out and see how it comes out.’ And everything I plugged into, it made it sound better.

My dream amp has long been the Cornford MK50 II, which won Guitarist awards when it came out. I bought one then and later sold it, then ended up buying it back because it’s my favourite amp. It doesn’t need anything, truthfully – it’s such a great amp from the off.

But then I plug this thing that we designed into it and it makes it sound better. It’s one of those moments where my go-to amp that I could just plug into now has been ruined: I now have to have this thing sat in front of it because it sounds better.

So I’m like’ ‘Great!’ [laughs]. But a shared misery is better than suffering in silence, so we’ve decided to release the thing so everyone else can have this pedal where they have to keep it on all the time…

Why did you choose to name it after an antelope specifically?

We went to release it and, I have to say, it was [co-director and Adrian’s wife] Georgia’s idea. She was like, ‘This needs to get out there because you know people don’t always have control over their backline – people don’t even necessarily have control over what amps they can use at home – but they want a sound that’s like the thing’s rocking at high volume when this kicks in.’

And so I actually turned around to Georgia and said, ‘Well, you design it, then.’ She did all the art and the layout and everything – Georgia is doing a lot more sort of the creative side, which has been really good.

We ended up calling it the Kudu because I spent a bit of time in South Africa and I’ve seen quite a lot of animals out there like the springbok, and then I saw these kudus and the one I saw was called a greater kudo, and that just seemed to fit: because it makes everything greater.

What are the core tones it generates and how can you use them?

Well, I hate to use this word, but it’s fairly transparent at low-gain settings because we have an ethos of having low noise and high clarity, generally, and lots of string separation, so that’s baked in as a must, right?

Then you wind the gain up and I would say the mid focus of it sits perfectly for a standard tuning guitar. Across the strings, it is absolutely perfect. So that’s where we centered everything.

Then as you wind the gain up more, it overdrives itself in just a perfect way, but it does have three clipping options: Hard clipping, which is LED; Soft clipping, which is silicon; and then Soft+ clipping – they’re Schottky diodes and they have a response and feel exactly the same as germanium.

They have a soft ‘knee’ and a flubbiness that is identical to germanium. But we haven’t put germanium in there because if we did germanium, we could only do a certain amount and it would make the pedal more expensive.

The reason the three [clipping styles] are available is because you may have, say, a Fender ‘Drip Tray’ Princeton, that’s fairly clean and clear, so you can get away with something that’s a little bit softer on the clipping, something with a bit more sag and flubbiness.

But if you’ve got a Tweed combo, you really need harder clipping because you’ve already got the compression from the amp and so you don’t want to be compressing and compressing.

So the clipping types were very specifically chosen with certain types of amp in mind: Soft is great for Marshall‑style amps; Hard is great for something with more sag; and then Soft+ is really if your amp is more present and with less negative feedback, so something like a Two-Rock.

• Find out more at ThorpyFX
• This article first appeared in Guitarist. Subscribe and save.

What is it?

Thorn Soundlabs is a relatively new pedal company formed in Nashville, USA. Its mission, it says, is to “redefine effects pedals with tools that inspire sonic exploration, not just sonic replication”.

We have six of the current Flex range of nine pedals here for review, the Flex in the name standing for flexible with the understanding that each pedal offers a wide range of variation within and maybe beyond its allotted task.

Drive, distortion and fuzz are respectively taken care of by the Bad Cash, Silver Spurs and Black Swamp, while The FreaQ provides boost with EQ functionality, and Steam is a compressor. The Tremonator is the sole modulation pedal in the bunch, offering tremolo with tap tempo.

Construction is reassuringly solid, and the pedals all run from a standard nine-volt adapter (no batteries), with four of them also taking an 18-volt supply for extra headroom.

A quick glance and one thing that’s apparent is that some of the pedals have controls with names that are not standard – most notably Damping and Headroom.

The Damping knob, found on the three dirt pedals and the boost, adjusts a variable filter that reduces the low-frequency content before the signal enters the overdrive circuit, working brilliantly for getting rid of any flub and tightening up your sound.

The Headroom knob is designed to adjust the clipping threshold of the output stage on the drive and distortion pedals, working in conjunction with the drive/gain knob to turn up the wick.

Specs

Thorn Soundlabs Bad Cash

• PRICE: $189 | £147 | €161
• ORIGIN: China
• TYPE: Drive pedal
• FEATURES: True bypass
• CONTROLS: Drive, Damping, Headroom, Volume, Bass, Mid, Treble, Presence, Symmetry O/I switch, Class A/AB switch, Bypass footswitch
• CONNECTIONS: Standard input, standard output
• POWER: 9V-18V DC adaptor 18mA 
• DIMENSIONS: 94 (w) x 120 (d) x 51mm (h) 

Thorn Soundlabs Silver Spurs

• PRICE: $189 | £156 | €169
• ORIGIN: China
• TYPE: Distortion pedal
• FEATURES: True bypass
• CONTROLS: Gain, Damping, Headroom, Volume, Bass, Mid, Treble, Presence, Bypass footswitch
• CONNECTIONS: Standard input, standard output
• POWER: 9V-18V DC adaptor 18mA
• DIMENSIONS: 94 (w) x 120 (d) x 51mm (h)

Thorn Soundlabs Black Swamp

• PRICE: $199 | £164 | €189
• ORIGIN: China
• TYPE: Fuzz pedal
• FEATURES: True bypass
• CONTROLS: Gain, Damping, Mid Freq, Volume, Bass, Mid, Treble, Character S/N/H switch, Hard Clip O/I switch, Bypass footswitch
• CONNECTIONS: Standard input, standard output
• POWER: 9V-18V DC adaptor 24mA 
• DIMENSIONS: 94 (w) x 120 (d) x 51mm (h)

Thorn Soundlabs The FreaQ

• PRICE: $149 | £121 | €139
• ORIGIN: China
• TYPE: Double Stage Booster pedal
• FEATURES: True bypass, Freq and Boost switching
• CONTROLS: Damping, Gain, Boost, Freq, Freq footswitch, Boost/Bypass footswitch
• CONNECTIONS: Standard input, standard output
• POWER: 9V-18V DC adaptor 18mA 
• DIMENSIONS: 94 (w) x 120 (d) x 51mm (h)

Thorn Soundlabs Steam

• PRICE: $204 | £164 | €189
• ORIGIN: China
• TYPE: Compressor pedal
• FEATURES: True bypass
• CONTROLS: Threshold, Amount, Attack, Release, Detail, Output, Auto/Manual switch, Bypass footswitch
• CONNECTIONS: Standard input, standard output
• POWER: 9V DC adaptor 29mA 
• DIMENSIONS: 94 (w) x 120 (d) x 51mm (h) 

Thorn Soundlabs Tremonator

• PRICE: $244 | £199 | €198
• ORIGIN: China
• TYPE: Tremolo pedal
• FEATURES: True bypass, Tap Tempo
• CONTROLS: Symmetry, Mix, Volume, Rate, Multiplier, Sine/Square Wave switch, Tap Tempo footswitch, Bypass footswitch
• CONNECTIONS: Standard input, standard output, external tap tempo (3.5mm jack)
• POWER: 9V DC adaptor 28mA 
• DIMENSIONS: 94 (w) x 120 (d) x 51mm (h) 
• CONTACT: Thorn Soundlabs

Build quality, usability and sounds

Bad Cash is an overdrive with a wide range of tone shaping available from its amp-like tone stack array of Bass, Mid, Treble and Presence knobs, as well as the aforementioned Damping and Headroom controls.

There are two clipping options available; symmetrical is the smoothest option, with asymmetrical delivering an edgier sound. There’s also a similar choice of output distortion characteristics with Class A or AB on offer, so a total of four nuanced voice combinations. With a wide clean to dirty range, this is one flexible drive pedal that should pair with any amp.

Silver Spurs has a similar set of controls to the Bad Cash but operates in a higher gain range. The aim here is classic British amp sound, which the pedal does with aplomb, spitting out aggressive raunch and heavier saturation.

Incidentally, there’s one more drive pedal that we couldn’t fit into this review and that’s the Magma, which is described as a Metal Distortion.

The last of the dirt pedals is the Black Swamp fuzz, although we’d say it’s as much a distortion as a fuzz in the same way that a Big Muff can be.

With a choice of Smooth, Normal or Hot for the fuzz character, as well as the options of soft or hard clipping, all shaped by the usual Damping, Bass and Treble knobs, there’s no mistaking the versatility available.

But the kicker here is the extra layer of detailed tone sculpture provided by the semi-parametric midrange EQ, which offers boost or cut anywhere between 310Hz and 2kHz.

The FreaQ, described as a Double Stage Booster, has a Boost footswitch that activates the first boost stage where the sound is only affected by the Damping and Boost knobs.

It starts from unity gain, so has plenty on tap, yet it also adds a subtle but sweet amount of top-end that can combine with the reduced lows from the Damping knob for added tonal enhancement.

The second Freq footswitch only works if the Boost footswitch is already engaged and adds the Gain and Freq controls into the mix to give you a targeted boost where a frequency between 200Hz and 3.4kHz can be cut or boosted by the Gain knobs. This is a really functional pedal that works equally well as an always-on tone conditioner or something to be kicked in as needed.

First port of call on the Steam compressor has to be the Auto/Manual switch to choose between automatic attack and release timing (which is really well dialled in), or use of the Attack and Release knobs for your preferred settings, especially in sculpting the transients. A Threshold knob sets the level at which compression starts and an Amount knob sets the intensity of compression.

But the secret weapon here is the Detail knob, ostensibly designed to restore the brightness perceived to have been lost due to compression and in reality a great tone enhancer to focus your top-end with up to +15dB of gain in the upper mid/treble frequency bands. Steam provides a practical compression toolbox with plenty of output for a boost, too.

Finally, the Tremonator provides a choice of decent-sounding sine or square-wave tremolo that can be further shaped by the Symmetry knob, which will dial in lopsided waveforms in either direction.

The tremolo is added to the dry sound by a Mix knob that runs from 100 per cent dry to 100 per cent wet – think of this as your depth control – while speed is set by the Rate knob.

Alternatively, you can set the speed via the Tap Tempo footswitch, which means you can sync to a drummer on the fly. A Multiplier knob multiplies any tempo inputted by either method.

Verdict

Verdict: ★★★★½

Some US pedals can get a bit pricey, but the ‘Designed in the USA/Made in China’ concept here keeps these units more reasonable. They’re neither budget pedals nor overly expensive.

The Bad Cash and Silver Spurs have a solid flexibility with tonal shaping options that set them apart from many other dirt pedals. Likewise, the Black Swamp benefits from the tonal focusing of its semi-parametric midrange.

Flexibility is again the name of the game with the FreaQ, offering plenty of gain on tap and tonally targeted, too, while Steam pretty much does everything you’d want from a guitar compressor (apart from the parallel compression that a dry mix knob would add).

Guitar World verdict: Considering its higher price, the Tremonator isn’t such a bargain as the rest, but overall this is a range of pedals endowed with thoughtfully considered features that would make them practical additions to a signal chain.

Hands-on videos

Thorn Soundlabs

Thomann

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• This article first appeared in Guitar World. Subscribe and save.

What is it?

With the reinvigorated DOD brand comes the opportunity to improve upon classic designs from their past.

The Drag is a new analog delay pedal designed by the minds behind the Rubberneck, a cult classic pedal that is still sought-after today.

The Rubberneck expanded the palette of what was possible with a bucket-brigade delay (BBD), with its novel time-stretching features. The Drag packs a lot of the same punch as the Rubberneck, while adding new modes into the mix.

Specs

• Price: $219.99 | £199
• Type: Bucket Brigade Device analog delay pedal
• Controls: Time, Level, Feedback, Filter, Curve Tails, Drift, Friction
• Features: Delay and time stretching
• Connectivity: Input, Output, Power, FS3X jack
• Bypass: True and Buffered/Tails (switchable)
• Power: 9V DC centre-negative 120mA
• Dimensions: 121 x 71 x 38 mm
• Weight: 10.58oz/0.30kg
• Contact: Digitech

Build quality

Build quality rating: ★★★★☆

The Drag is a good-looking pedal. It's sturdy as you'd expect, and the artwork is a nice, cyberpunk-ish nod to classic Manga film Akira. It comes with a complementary magnetic front plate that can be stuck to a DigiTech FS3X footswitch, so that their designs match.

There are also some automotive-themed screwdrivers, plectrums and stickers as case candy, continuing DOD's commitment to adding some fun to proceedings as it did with the Badder Monkey.

To my eye, there is an accident waiting to happen with the pedal, however. Either side of the footswitch are two mini knobs. Now, only time can tell whether or not these will break, but it's enough to make me wary.

Usability and features

Usability and features rating: ★★★★☆

The biggest strength of the Drag also reveals its biggest issue. The DOD Rubberneck was a feature-rich, double-width enclosure, with three large pots, two dual-mode pots, two small pots, and two toggles on the front plate, as well as two footswitches.

The Drag, meanwhile, attempts to cram the same functionality, and more, into a single footswitch compact pedal. For the player, this means a great deal of poking around on the front panel, and the need for an expansion footswitch to get the most out of it. As a result of this complexity, it failed my 'can this be used without looking at the manual' test pretty fast.

In the end, it's a minor complaint, since at least the FS3X isn't too expensive at around $60, but needing the pedalboard real estate to use it is a big drawback. This takes the footprint of the two up to around the same size as a flagship digital multi-delay like a Boss or Strymon.

Sounds

Sounds rating: ★★★★★

At its core, the DOD Drag is an excellent-sounding analogue delay. Depending on where you are in the world, its base price point might be competitive enough to purchase the Drag as a BBD delay, full-stop. Additionally, less space-cadet features like modulation are then just a bonus.

As a BBD delay, it's got a dark, rich voicing, which means I prefer bridge pickups so that it will cut through the mix. Combined with its modulation features, it has the ability to be used in more of a textural way, much like a tape echo.

However much I enjoy setting it up like a Roland Space Echo, then calling it a day, it's the additional features that make it stand out from the competition. Of these, the tape stop effect is the most fun, although admittedly it is an effect that's easy to replicate on record or in a DAW.

The pitch bouncing of the original Rubberneck also returns, but if you've got an EHX Pitch Fork, Boss Shifter or Whammy, then it's less controllable than those options. Where it is superior is in its unique, warm timbre.

Across all the additional modes, the best part is the unexpected. These BBD chips are being pushed to their limits and beyond, and sometimes the results are unusual or glitchy. Paired with a gated fuzz and whammy in front, the results can be incredibly fun.

Verdict

The DOD Drag is a great-sounding, solidly built pedal that is nevertheless held back by two things.

First, the complexity of its interface, and second, the need for a better way to interact with the depth of its functionality. If those two things aren't a deal-breaker for you, then you should definitely check it out.

Guitar World verdict: All in all, the Drag deserves credit for being an unusual pedal that is trying to do something new. The sounds within are solid at their core and fun, bordering on thrilling at the extreme. The only issue is figuring the pedal out – luckily for the Drag, trial and error is pretty rewarding.

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Hands-on videos

DigiTech

• Best delay pedals

More and more bands are turning to everything from amp modelers to headless guitars to shrink their gig rigs. Typically, that means modeling a big, beefy tube amp and packing it into a tiny unit for the best of both worlds. But it doesn’t have to be.

Australia’s lovable psych rock lunatics, King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, believe in small amp supremacy, and their new pedal is here to spread the message. The Tiny Amp Destroyer is a tiny amp in an even tinier box, and, by Stu Mackenzie’s count, it’s “fucking sick.”

Made in collaboration with Greek co JAM Pedals, it’s based on the sound of a tiny $29 practice amp Mackenzie found at the pawn shop Cash Converters that sounded “cool, loud, and awesome.” It’s been on every Gizzard record since he bought it, which means it probably features on at least 45.

The Tiny Amp Destroyer is being billed as a three-footswitch gain machine, combining two independent drive stages with a standalone treble booster. Tonally, it traverses focused low-gain overdrive plains, through to “raw, boxy distortion” valleys and “dense, blown-out saturation” plateaus.

But it isn’t just the amp alone. The process started by pushing two JAM Boomster booster pedals into the amp and pushing it to the point of unruly, unstable breakup. The pedal is the soundtrack of the bargain combo being pushed far beyond the point of comfort. It’s the amp screaming for dear life. Small amp lifer Josh Homme will likely be first in line. And it all furthers our case that the age of “bad” guitar tone is officially over.

Active Bass and Treble controls, plus Magic and Notch dials, give players “the freedom to shape that instability,” for as much or as little control as they please.

This being Gizzard, of course there’s a splash of insanity in there. In this case, the lights change from blue to purple, depending on how cranked (or un-cranked) its dials are.

“It rips so hard, it’s insane,” Mackenzie says. “People should play way tinier amps. Fuck all this huge amp business. So I thought, ‘Everyone needs a Tiny Amp Destroyer,’ because it makes your massive amp sound tiny. And it’s just way better.”

“TAD is not an amp in a box,” adds Jam Pedals. “It is the sound of the box losing the fight.”

The first 50 units sold by JAM Pedals come hand-signed by Stu Mackenzie and Jason Galea, the band’s longtime artist who created the pedal’s visuals.

It’s priced at $399/£319 and available to order now.

See JAM Pedals for more.

What is it?

The Cry Baby has to be the most well-known wah pedal in existence, and a perusal of current manufacturer Jim Dunlop’s website reveals no less than 37 different variations in the roster, including signature models for a whole host of players.

Now, while there’s nothing wrong with buying, say, the Jimi Hendrix edition if that provides exactly the sound you want, that model has one basic voice with a sweep that covers one specific frequency range – great if you want to bash out your version of Voodoo Chile but possibly not so great if you want to get wacka-wacka funky with Theme From Shaft.

If you like to play a wide variety of musical styles, a better fit for your rig might be the newly released Cry Baby BB535 Reissue, which is based on a long-discontinued model from 1994 known for its throaty growl and sports a choice of six frequency ranges for the sweep, plus a variable boost.

Specs

• PRICE: $229 | £229 | €269
• ORIGIN: USA
• TYPE: Wah pedal
• FEATURES: Buffered bypass, up to 12dB of boost, 6x freq ranges: 444-2,117Hz, 385-1,888Hz, 300-1,468Hz, 248-1,217Hz, 214-1,050Hz & 173-847Hz 
• CONTROLS: Boost switch, Boost volume, Wah Range selector, treadle, Activate footswitch
• CONNECTIONS: Standard input, standard output
• POWER: 9V battery or 9V DC adaptor (not supplied) 12mA
• DIMENSIONS: 115 (w) x 251 (d) x 75mm (h) 
• CONTACT: Jim Dunlop

Build quality, usability and sounds

With the solid, weighty construction seen in all Cry Baby units, this model features controls on its right-hand side that can be adjusted by foot if needed.

A rotary switch with a hard rubber covering selects the frequency range, while a tiny red mushroom-shaped switch can be pushed in to engage a boost of up to 12dB, set by an adjacent knob. The boost (which only works if the wah treadle is engaged) is based on the MXR micro amp and has plenty of poke to take things up a level as needed.

Treadle action is smooth but firm, with enough stiffness to leave it in a fixed position for cocked wah sounds. There’s a reduction of top-end at the toe position as you work through the six frequencies, coupled with an increase of low-end at the heel, so each basically offers a different midrange sweep.

Switch position 1 is the brightest and will let you ‘wacka wacka’ back to the ’70s, while switch position 6 provides the darkest tone and a pronounced vocal ‘wow’. In between those two you’ll find equally valid variations on the expressive vocal quality in which the pedal excels – try them all and find which feels best for you underfoot.

Verdict

Verdict: ★★★★½

Guitar World verdict: Six range options and a boost to lift things when needed makes the Cry Baby BB535 Reissue a very versatile wah pedal that has you covered for whatever style of music you play.

Hands-on videos

Jim Dunlop

R.J. Ronquilo

Guitar Center

• “For many wah enthusiasts, Clyde McCoy wahs are considered the ‘Holy Grail’, and Xotic has replicated its tonal recipe”: Xotic XW-2 Wah – Red Limited review
• This article first appeared in Guitarist. Subscribe and save.

What is it?

Dirty Boy has spent the better part of two decades being the kind of name that circulates among tone-obsessed players rather than showing up in big-budget ad campaigns.

Founded by Alex Saraceno, who started out building pedals for his son, virtuoso guitarist Blues Saraceno, Dirty Boy built its reputation on boutique, hand-assembled circuits that have quietly turned up on the boards of Neal Schon, Phil X and John Frusciante.

Under current owner Danny Gomez, the brand’s reputation has held up well but buying a hand-built Dirty Boy pedal has never been an easy purchase: they sell for $349 and typically move fast whenever a batch appears.

The Dirty Boy Jr. Fuzz is the product of a new partnership between Dirty Boy and Warm Audio, a company that has built its own name recreating expensive or hard-to-find gear at accessible prices.

It's one of three "Jr." pedals launching together, alongside the Booster and Overdrive, all built by Warm Audio. The Jr. Fuzz is based on the original hand wired Dirty Boy "Afro Fuzz" circuit, which uses premium transistors and vintage-voiced components, on a classic British fuzz pedal format.

It lands in a crowded field of under-$200, vintage-voiced silicon fuzzes, going up against pedals such as the JHS 3 Series Fuzz and Dunlop's Fuzz Face Mini series, all chasing a similar promise of classic fuzz character without the boutique price tag.

Specs

• Price: $169 | £169 | €189 
• Type: Fuzz pedal
• Controls: Fuzz, Level, 6-position Frequency selector
• Features: All-analog silicon fuzz circuit built around Dirty Boy's "Afro Fuzz" design; premium transistors and vintage-voiced components; touch-sensitive response to guitar volume and pick attack
• Connectivity: 1/4" instrument input, 1/4" amp output. No MIDI, USB, expression pedal input, effects loop or Bluetooth
• Bypass: True bypass
• Power: 9V DC, centre-negative power supply (not included). Warm Audio has not published a current draw (mA) figure for this pedal at time of writing
• Dimensions: 51 x 65 x 122mm (W x H x D)
• Weight: 9.5oz / 0.27kg
• Contact: Warm Audio

Build quality

Build quality rating: ★★★★½

There's nothing fancy about the way the Dirty Boy Jr. Fuzz presents itself and that feels intentional. It ships in a compact die-cast enclosure with input and output jacks positioned on the sides to keep its footprint tight on a crowded board.

The two chunky control knobs feel snug rather than loose, the six-position Frequency selector clicks positively between settings rather than feeling vague, and the footswitch has the kind of firm, no-nonsense action you want from something that's going to spend its life getting stomped on in dark venues.

Warm Audio has built its reputation on hitting a price point without visibly cutting corners and that holds up here. The yellow-on-black Dirty Boy graphics are a nice nod to the original pedal’s boutique styling without looking like a cheap sticker job, and the single LED gives a solid read on whether the pedal is engaged.

This won't have the hand-soldered, point-to-point mystique of an original Dirty Boy build but as a pedal you Velcro down and leave in place, it feels solid and stays dead quiet until the footswitch is pressed.

Usability and features

Usability and features rating: ★★★★☆

This is a simple pedal, and it wants to stay that way. Fuzz and Level do exactly what their names suggest and run from a lightly ragged breakup to full on fuzzy saturation. This is a fully analog circuit with nothing hiding under the hood, in contrast to some rivals like Strymon's Canoga, which includes an internal jumper for setting the power-up state.

I tested the pedal with a Strat and a Les Paul, both into a Fender '62 Deluxe reissue set for a warm edge-of-breakup sound. The six-position Frequency selector is really doing the work of turning this from a basic two-knob fuzz into something with genuine range, and that's where it pulls ahead of similarly priced single-knob rivals like the EarthQuaker Erupter.

It doesn't offer the continuously sweepable tone control of a full-featured drive pedal, and it can't match the JHS 3 Series Fuzz's dedicated Bias knob for players who like gated, sputtery textures, but for players who want more usable voicings without more knobs to manage on a small board, it's a good trade-off.

Sounds

Sounds rating: ★★★★½

I started with the Frequency selector in its middle position and both Fuzz and Level around noon. With the '62 Deluxe already sitting at a warm edge of breakup, the Jr. Fuzz immediately brought the amp to life, adding a slightly compressed, midrange-forward growl without taking away the feel of the amp underneath. It responded to pick attack in a way that rewards playing dynamics rather than just compressing everything into saturation.

Rolling the guitar's volume back to around 7 brought out the party trick with both guitars: the Jr. Fuzz cleaned up into something between a soft overdrive and a slightly sharp-edged clean tone, without losing top-end clarity or turning muddy. That's the real test for this kind of vintage-voiced fuzz, and the Jr. passes with flying colors, noticeably more so than the Earthquaker Erupter, which loses a little more sparkle as you back off the volume.

My favorite setting came with both Fuzz and Level turned all the way up. From there, I worked through all six Frequency positions, and what impressed me was that every setting remained musical while changing the way the fuzz sat around the guitar and amp.

Toward the low end, the Les Paul gained real weight without collapsing into low-end mush; at the sharper end, there was enough cut for leads without crossing into the harsh, fizzy territory that cheaper fuzz circuits can fall into. Dimed, the Jr. Fuzz felt big and lively, but the Frequency selector kept that aggression surprisingly usable.

Stacking the Jr. Fuzz with an EQ pedal for a clean boost pushes the front end harder without smearing the fuzz's texture, and it plays nicely with a Strymon Ultraviolet modulation pedal further down the chain for more psychedelic textures.

It's not a pedal that reinvents what a boutique fuzz should sound like, and it isn't trying to. The Jr. Fuzz does an impressive job of capturing the sound and feel of a pricey boutique circuit.

Verdict

Fuzz pedals live or die on personality, and the Dirty Boy Jr. Fuzz has enough of it to justify a spot in an already crowded market. It doesn't try to out-feature the competition with tone stacks, gates or bias trims but instead it leans on a distinctive circuit and a thoughtful way of accessing more of that circuit's range than a two-knob layout would normally allow.

Players chasing maximum tweak-ability may still prefer the JHS 3 Series Fuzz's Bias control, and diehard Dirty Boy fans will always want the hand-built original version.

This collab pedal may not fully replicate the tone and feel of the hand wired Afro Fuzz, but that's a fair trade off for the price drop.

Judged on its own merits, the Jr. Fuzz punches well above its $169 price tag. For players who've heard about Dirty Boy's reputation but never had a shot at owning one, this is the most accessible that reputation has ever been.

Guitar World verdict: Warm Audio and Dirty Boy shrink a $349 cult-favorite circuit into an affordable, gig-ready package. The six-position Frequency selector adds real range, and it cleans up beautifully with guitar volume, though purists chasing hand-built boutique mystique, or more onboard tweakability, may look elsewhere.

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JHS Pedals has partnered with DIY pedal specialist Coppersound for its latest make-it-yourself stompbox, the Short Circuit.

It becomes the latest build-at-home stompbox to bear the JHS Pedals name, following the Notaklön and Notadümblë drive pedals. It also joins Coppersound’s generous lineup of DIY pedal packs.

That said, this one is slightly different. It foregoes the IKEA-style, white enclosure in favor of a more rugged chassis in keeping with the Coppersound aesthetic.

It does sort of keep the naming style, though: the $119 Short Circuit has been described as a versatile, three-in-one Boost-a-Drive-a-Fuzz pedal.

The industrial pedal has controls for Volume, Gain, and Filter, as well as a Mode switch to flick between those three voices. There’s also a sole footswitch and the customary ‘On’ LED indicator.

Notably, the Short Circuit looks to be a far more involved DIY project, vastly more hands-on than anything JHS Pedals has released in the past. The foolproof Notaklön and Notadümble pedals only needed a few cables connecting and some screws tightening.

The Short Circuit is a much more advanced project. It has a PCB board upon which you’ll need to attach an assortment of electrolytic caps, film caps, diodes, resistors, transistors, potentiometers, ribbons, power jacks, and more.

You’ll also need a bunch more tools, including a soldering iron, an array of wrenches, a screwdriver, flush cutters, needle nose pliers, and – if you’re feeling really fancy – a multimeter.

So, yes, fans of the first two pedals, expect a big step up here. Equally, it looks like a nice level to graduate to for those who felt that the Notaklön and Notadümblë were a bit too easy.

The Short Circuit has been in the works for a while and marks a sizable release for JHS Pedals founder Josh Scott. As he explained in a build-along livestream, it was the project he was working on before he suffered a horror bike accident last year.

In August 2025, Scott was forced to take a step back from his business to recover from the accident. John Mayer kindly stepped in as a temporary pedal demo-er in his absence.

“This is a bit of a personal marker for me,” Scott says. “I was in a pretty hideous mountain biking accident and I did almost die. I broke my nose in two places [and needed] 29 stitches on my face.

“I broke my back, I broke my hand, I was lacerated all over my body. It was pretty nuts. I did all this right before that.”

Scott opened up to Guitar World about his accident in an interview last year, and revealed how Mayer's impromptu demo of the 424 Gain Stage came to pass.

The Short Circuit is available now for $119.

Head over to Coppersound to find out more.

What is it?

The Hazee Delay, the first in the Pollinator series, is a bit of a departure for Beetronics in that it’s the company’s first totally digital pedal.

In true Beetronics style, though, this is not just a standard digital delay pedal but one that’s designed to deliver textural delays and ambient sounds.

This is a pedal solely for modulated delays, not simply delays where there’s a bit of wobble on the repeats – we’re talking delays where the modulation is a totally integrated component of the sound as the modulation comes first in the signal chain and is then delayed.

There are eight modes of modulation available – four tremolo and four filter – each mode featuring a different type of repeat, giving you a choice of forward repeats, octave up repeats, reverse repeats and octave up reverse repeats.

There are just four knobs to adjust the effect: the delay pedal staples are Time, Mix and Feedback, and the Mod knob controls the modulation rate.

Specs

• Price: $249 | £229
• Type: Digital delay pedal
• Origin: USA
• Features: Buffered bypass
• Controls: Time, Feedback, Mix, Modulation, Mode selector, Bypass footswitch
• Connections: Standard input, standard output
• Power: 9V DC adaptor (not supplied) 80 mA
• Contact: Beetronics FX

Build quality, usability and sounds

The Hazee Delay controls are very interactive – small changes can have a big effect on the sonic outcome – so experimentation followed by considered adjustment is the key to getting the pedal to work for you.

It can be an inspirational and creative tool in that certain modes may encourage you to adapt your playing in reaction to what you’re hearing, rather than adjusting the controls to fit your playing.

There’s quirky stuff here, for sure, but the modes that are most conventional are those that offer the non-pitch-shifted forward repeats.

For example, the filter will give you auto-wah effects and even something that sounds like a rotary speaker at fast Mod rates, while the tremolo offers a nicely rounded pulse; keep the delay time at minimum if you want something closer to a straight effect.

With the pitch-shifted and reverse repeats, the other modes offer a more ‘out there’ take on things and are capable of pulsing and shimmering sonic layers with rhythmic movement as the repeats and modulation interact.

Verdict

Verdict: ★★★★

Guitar World verdict: This pedal encourages you to twist the knobs until you find a favoured sweet spot and offers plenty to explore in the realm of strangely voiced repeats and finely textured ambient soundscapes to sit with your core sound. Not your average digital delay by any means, the Hazee Delay is a vibe machine that could help get those creative juices flowing.

Hands-on videos

Beetronics

Kris Barosci

The Studio Rats

• “Lo-Fi and Pitch modes take you well beyond the usual analog delay paradigm”: Beetronics Bee Bee Dee review
• This article first appeared in Guitarist. Subscribe and save.

Jack White’s Third Man Hardware is back with another collaborative pedal, this time creating a buzz with Beetronics with the Old Zoo Lion Meat.

The bizarrely named pedal, which looks like a can of tuna, is a short-run fuzz pedal limited to just 333 units. It’s not the first time White’s left-of-center gear firm has spat out a fuzz box, but none have been this streamlined.

The stompbox redresses Beettronics’ tuna-can design, offering “thick, vintage-inspired tones” and a no-frills single-dial design. Turning the ‘Phlegmatic Roar’ dial sets the overall output volume, while the fuzz is dictated by the Volume knob of a player’s electric guitar.

When rolled back, it promises an articulate clean. When at its most extreme, expect a “roaring wall of vintage fuzz”.

In a quirky twist, the pedal’s underside features a transparent back cover, meaning Beetronics’ bee-bestowed circuit board is visible. And there’s not even a hint of tuna to be seen.

Artwork has been provided by Rob Jones, with whom White has worked before. The pedal ships in “an over-the-top blister pack” which is, fittingly, designed to look like a vintage meat label, and plays on the biblical story of Samson and the lion.

As a statement from the collaboration says: “Eat up, then plug in to give your guitar a belly full of bees, like the carcass of Samson’s legendary leonine corpse.”

Each pedal is priced at $150 and is exclusively available via Reverb.

However, at the time of writing, the drop has already buzzed off. As such, Reverb recommends users hit the heart icon in case any second-hand units appear on the site in the future.

For other eye-catching Third Man Hardware collabs, see its one-of-a-kind reverb, made with JHS Pedals, and the Knife Drop, a synth/octave/overdrive built with Eventide.

Beetronics, meanwhile, ventured beyond the usual analog delay paradigm with its recent release, the Bee Bee Dee.

As the trade war escalates between the US and Canada, with the Trump administration applying a 50 percent tariff on selected goods imported from Canada, there will be some knock-on effects on prices paid by American consumers.

If you’re buying potash, salmon, and critical minerals from Canada, shop as usual. The 50 percent Section 338 tariffs do not affect you. If you’re buying, say, cars and aluminum, there’s no change – these are already covered. But say you are in the market for a guitar effects pedal from north of the border – or indeed an electric guitar or tube amp – then you might be in for a shock.

Empress Effects is the first of the high-profile Canadian gear brands to break cover and warn customers that from August 5, “tariffs, duties, or import fees” will be the responsibility of the customer.

This does not mean that, if you were to buy a ZOIA modular synth pedal for $549 from the Empress website, you would automatically be paying 50 percent on top of that (around $823, not including any local taxes etc), but that the US Customs department will calculate whatever duties are payable on the imported value of the item – and then those duties will be payable to your courier.

Of course, many retailers across the US will already have some of the Empress catalog in stock, so it might take some time for these costs to filter through, and in that time the tariffs could be paused or cancelled altogether. This is, however, another example of how the market for guitar gear is vulnerable to externalities such as this.

Steve Bragg, owner and designer at Empress Effects, says until now the company has been able to absorb the cost of tariffs, but not any longer.

“Because shipments can take up to two weeks to reach and clear the U.S. border, orders placed on or after August 5 may be subject to the new tariffs,” he writes. “Beginning August 5, any applicable tariffs, duties, or import fees will therefore be the responsibility of the customer.

“We’re hopeful that a resolution will be reached quickly. Until then, we’ll continue to cover all applicable tariffs on orders shipped to the United States before August 5.”

It will not just be Empress Effects that will be facing these difficult decisions. Revv Amplification, Godin, and other Canadian gear brands will be figuring out how all of this shakes out financially.

The economic rationale behind the tariff is that it will encourage US consumers to buy a rival domestic product, or for a domestic manufacturer to make one. Good luck in finding an alternative to the ZOIA.

Pedals Week 2026: Every now and then, a pedal comes along that leaves guitarists wondering what they just plugged into. Maybe it looks different. Maybe it works differently. Or maybe it solves a problem that nobody was really thinking about at the time.

Whatever the reason, some of the most interesting effects ever made didn't become favorites overnight. In fact, quite a few were overlooked, misunderstood or simply ahead of their time.

Looking back now, it's easy to see just how many of these once overlooked ideas helped shape the way guitarists think about effects today.

1. Boss SG-1 Slow Gear

The SG-1 has always been one of Boss's most misunderstood pedals. Instead of adding gain, delay or modulation, it simply fades in every note automatically, creating smooth violin-like swells without touching the guitar's volume control.

When it arrived in 1979, most players had no idea what to make of it. It didn't fit into any familiar category, and there wasn't much music calling for that kind of effect. Fast forward a few decades and it suddenly makes perfect sense.

Ambient players, soundtrack composers and experimental guitarists all discovered something Boss had quietly introduced years before anyone was really ready for it.

2. EarthQuaker Devices Rainbow Machine

Few pedals have left guitarists scratching their heads quite like the Rainbow Machine. The controls seem almost random at first, and the sounds range from subtle pitch modulation to noises that don't sound much like a guitar at all.

That's probably why so many players weren't quite sure what to make of it when it first appeared. Anyone expecting a conventional harmonizer was likely disappointed.

Dial it back and it adds movement and texture that few pedals can match. Turn it up and things get weird in a hurry. The Rainbow Machine isn't for everyone, and that's exactly the point.

3. Electro-Harmonix Attack Decay

The Attack Decay is one of those pedals that almost defies explanation until it's plugged in. On the surface, it recreates the automatic volume swells of Electro-Harmonix's original late-'70s design, but that's really only the beginning.

With adjustable attack, reverse-style envelopes, fuzz and expression control, it can drift from violin-like swells to synth textures and sounds that barely resemble a guitar. That's probably why it never became a mainstream hit. It asks players to experiment instead of reaching for familiar tones.

Those willing to spend the time are rewarded with one of the most creative and inspiring pedals Electro-Harmonix has ever produced.

4. Boss DF-2 Super Feedbacker & Distortion

The DF-2 is one of those pedals that's much easier to appreciate today than it was when it first appeared in the mid-'80s. Most players saw the word "Distortion" on the enclosure and treated it like another gain pedal, but the real innovation was hidden under the footswitch.

Hold it down and the DF-2 generates controllable amplifier-style feedback, even at volumes where natural feedback would be impossible. At the time, it felt like an odd feature that few players really needed.

Looking back, Boss was solving a problem decades before the rest of the industry caught on. Fast forward a few decades, and what once seemed like a gimmick now feels surprisingly innovative.

5. Boss TE-2 Tera Echo

Trying to describe the Tera Echo is almost impossible because it isn't really a delay, a reverb or a modulation pedal. It borrows ideas from all three, creating spacious, blooming echoes that react to the player's touch in a way that's still difficult to explain. That may be one reason it slipped under the radar.

Guitarists naturally tried comparing it to traditional delays, only to discover it played by its own rules. Give it a little time, though, and its strengths become obvious. The Tera Echo isn't trying to sound like a delay or a reverb. It really does its own thing.

6. Electro-Harmonix HOG

One look at the HOG was enough to intimidate a lot of guitarists. Between all the sliders, switches and expression pedal options, it looked more like a synthesizer than a stompbox. This is probably one reason why it never caught on with the average player.

Spend a little time with it, though, and it starts to make sense. It can create everything from convincing organ sounds and rich octave layers to swelling pads and sounds that barely resemble a guitar.

Most players simply weren't looking for a pedal that could do this much. The HOG wasn't overlooked because it lacked great sounds. It was overlooked because many players never got far enough to it to discover them.

7. Boss DA-2 Adaptive Distortion

At a glance, the DA-2 looks like just another distortion pedal, and that's probably why so many players passed it by. Hidden beneath the familiar controls, however, is Boss's Adaptive Distortion technology, which constantly analyzes your playing and adjusts the distortion across the frequency range. The result is a surprisingly balanced sound that stays articulate whether you're playing open chords or single-note lines high on the neck. It never enjoyed the cult status of classic Boss dirt boxes but that may have had more to do with timing than tone. There's a really good distortion pedal hiding underneath all that technology.

8. Pigtronix Mothership

One look at the Mothership and it's pretty obvious this isn't your average pedal. Part analog synth, part octave generator and part fuzz, it can produce everything from thick octave sounds to quirky synth tones that barely resemble a guitar.

It's not a pedal you can just stomp on and expect instant results. The Mothership rewards clean, accurate technique, and if your playing gets sloppy, you're probably not hearing it at its best. That alone was enough to turn some players away. Those who spent the time with it discovered one of the most expressive and creative analog synth pedals ever built.

9. Z.Vex Seek Wah

The Seek Wah doesn't resemble or behave anything like a traditional wah pedal. Instead of a rocker pedal that sweeps back and forth, you're greeted by a row of lights, knobs and switches that hint at something completely different. It steps through a series of programmable filter patterns that can sound rhythmic, random or somewhere in between. This confused many guitar players.

But the Seek Wah wasn't trying to replace a Cry Baby or Vox wah. It was trying to do something completely different. Players willing to think beyond a traditional wah discovered it could do things no Cry Baby ever could.

10. DigiTech FreqOut Natural Feedback Creator

Initially, creating controllable feedback with a stompbox sounded more like a novelty than something guitarists would actually use. That's exactly why so many players overlooked the DigiTech FreqOut when it first appeared.

Instead of relying on a loud amp, it electronically recreates natural harmonic feedback at almost any volume, with controls that let you choose different feedback harmonics and even adjust how quickly the feedback blooms into each note.

Back then, if you wanted endless sustain, you simply turned the amp up. Today, with lower stage volumes, modelers and home studios becoming the norm, the FreqOut makes more sense than ever.

Pedals Week 2026: Looper pedals are undoubtedly one of the best writing tools a guitar player can have in their arsenal, but they’re also invaluable for anyone looking to sharpen their skills as a soloist, both technically and theoretically.

You could take the chord progression from one of your favorite songs, for example, and start testing out new ideas – which will help you find your voice and identity on your instrument.

As any Guitar World reader already knows, it can be highly rewarding to learn your favorite solos note for note, but studying the chord progression underneath them will help you put your own spin on things. And this is precisely where a looper will come in handy.

Some of the world’s greatest solos were written over movements that allowed the players to create something truly astounding and unique. The more attention you pay to chords and rhythms, the more impactful your solo might end up sounding.

Play the chords into your looper and start experimenting with different sounds and feels. You might notice how some tracks stay in one key and allow you to build your story a scene at a time without any radical harmonic departures.

In other situations, you might notice that some of the chords you’re playing over allow you to add in other tonalities and venture outside of the key, with options for more ear-catching notes from a different scale – from the introduction of Dorian, Aeolian or Mixolydian flavors to more dramatic-sounding harmonic and melodic minor scales.

So, even if you feel like music theory isn’t a strong point, just a little bit of due diligence can go a long way to impress listeners and help you learn how to deliver a solo that truly soars and sings. Your ear is the most important thing here.

Here are 10 tracks that are great for looping, with repetitive progressions that give you plenty of opportunities to conjure up something extra special.

1. Eagles – Hotel California

It’s one of those songs that’s always in the running for the greatest guitar solo(s) of all-time, with Don Felder and Joe Walsh going head to head before joining forces for some lavish harmonized arpeggios at the end.

The minor chord progression underneath is what gives ample opportunity to create something dramatic, with the V chord being changed to dominant (F#7 instead of F#min) and the IV chord alternating between major and minor instead of staying minor.

This is what allows soloists to switch between B pentatonic and Aeolian to harmonic minor, especially on the substituted chords Ultimately, the goal here is to not stick with one scale – make your solo more fluid and unpredictable to catch listeners off-guard.

2. John Mayer – Slow Dancing In A Burning Room

If you’re looking for the perfect song to master your C# minor pentatonic chops, as well as its E major relative, this could very well be it. Unlike Hotel California, the progression is completely diatonic and therefore feels like it’s all in one key, so it’s more about phrasing and delivery than note choices when targeting chords.

With a laid-back tempo and slinky feel, it’s the kind of musical scenario that calls for big pentatonic bends, and therefore works as a practice tool for pitch accuracy. It’s worth asking yourself what note are you trying to bend up to and how close are you getting.

3. Pink Floyd – Comfortably Numb

Often cited as one of David Gilmour’s greatest moments, this final single from Pink Floyd’s 1979 rock opera The Wall is an absolute masterclass in how to speak B minor pentatonic.

Pay attention to your vibrato and note choice, because these are two areas where Gilmour is known to excel, and see if you can find your own lines that feel natural and avoid over-complication.

The bar where the chords drop from G to F#min and Emin calls for something extra special – think about what you can play to emphasize the movement underneath you and have some fun with it.

4. B.B. King – The Thrill Is Gone

Anyone trying to master the art of 12-bar blues will undoubtedly come across this Grammy-winning hit from 1969. This is another B minor progression that’s all about the bends – know exactly what you’re aiming for and see what happens when you undershoot or overshoot to unlock “the in-between notes” on the fretboard, like the original blues masters.

The minor pentatonic will be your friend here, but if you’re looking to spice things up, try introducing B melodic minor or A# half-whole diminished scales over the dominant chord (F#7) to create tension before the progression returns to root. This resolution from the V chord to the I is often referred to as a perfect cadence.

5. Metallica – Wherever I May Roam

Arguably one of the most famous heavy metal tracks written using the Phrygian scale, the fourth single from Metallica’s self-titled landmark album of 1991 is a great way of introducing yourself to more outside ideas.

For his solo, Kirk Hammett chose to use a mixture of E minor pentatonic and E Phrygian Dominant – which is the fifth mode of A harmonic minor – to great effect. The big jump from a minor second to a major third is a surefire way of capturing people’s attention.

Use it too much, however, and it loses its effect. So try switching between Phrygian, which has a minor third, and its dominant sibling to mix things up – essentially swapping a G for a G# wherever you think it feels right. Follow your ears and have fun.

6. Led Zeppelin – Stairway To Heaven

Maybe don’t try this one while testing looper pedals in your local guitar shop, but if you’re hoping to explore the world of natural minor, this hit provides a perfect backdrop.

The A minor pentatonic scale will do the trick for most of the chords, but highlighting the F chord with an F note will add a sense of sophistication to what you play, showing everyone how you understand the song’s inner workings by targeting the sound of a minor 6th at exactly the right time.

If you listen to the last note of Jimmy Page’s opening line, you’ll hear how it creates an atmosphere of tension after the familiarity of more bluesy sounds.

7. Free – All Right Now

Some of the world’s greatest guitar solos aren’t strictly major or minor, with the player blending ideas from both worlds into one seamless package. This 1970 hit is one of those, thanks to Paul Kossoff’s iconic fretwork halfway into the song.

Maybe start off in A major pentatonic and work your way into A minor pentatonic as your solo builds towards its grand crescendo, or try using both in a ‘call and answer’ fashion. Kossoff’s vibrato also played a huge part in his solo’s overall feel, so experiment with how you shake the notes you’re choosing to let ring – there’s plenty of space to get creative and express yourself here.

8. Joe Bonamassa – Sloe Gin

The New York blues maverick is one of the undisputed titans of the long-form solo, and the title track from his 2007 album is the perfect example of why that is. Once you’ve recorded the chords into your looping pedal, begin with some simple phrases in D minor and slowly build your ideas in terms of intensity and dynamics.

The original solo is almost three minutes long and never outstays its welcome. Holding back is an art form in itself – and playing along to a progression like this is a great way of learning how to flow naturally through control and discipline, keeping the listener on the edge of their seats every step of the way.

The chords to Purple Rain by Prince would also work very well for this – look at it as telling a story with a beginning, middle and end, rather than going in all guns blazing.

9. Joe Satriani – Flying In A Blue Dream

If you’re mainly used to pentatonic scales, Lydian – which is the fourth mode of the major scale – can present some serious challenges when it comes to phrasing.

Jamming along to the chords from this title track on Joe Satriani’s third full-length, released in 1989, is a great way of familiarizing yourself with these shapes and sounds. You can look at C Lydian from a G major perspective, which is its parent scale, or think of it as C major with a sharpened fourth, or even C major pentatonic with the inclusion of a B and an F.

Ultimately, different ways of visualizing a scale can help you explore new sonic horizons. Experiment with every possibility, even the ones that feel more confusing and less natural, because they might push you in a completely new direction.

10. Gary Moore – Parisienne Walkways

Much like Moore’s most famous track Still Got The Blues, this late ’70s hit is a great way of getting used to cycle-of-fifth progressions, also typified by songs like Autumn Leaves and I Will Survive.

Parisienne Walkways is in the key of A natural minor but at the end of the main progression, the perfect cadence of a V chord (E7) into the I chord (Amin) provides an opportunity to use the A harmonic minor scale for extra tension, which is then released by resolving back to the root.

Like Stairway To Heaven, it’s a great way of learning how to change just one note over the right chord and provide more depth for the listener to appreciate, taking them on a journey that travels further and therefore exceeds expectation.

Pedals Week 2026: The guitar pedal is an ever-evolving format, but also an ever-present one. The first guitar pedals were introduced only in the early 1960s, but in the intervening years they’ve been a source of change in sounds, tastes and techniques in guitar music.

As technology has advanced, so has the debate between the two core types of guitar pedal: analog and digital. Each one elicits different opinions, preconceived notions, and even prejudices: analog and digital. Analog warmth; digital artifacts. Analog mojo; digital harshness. Alternately, noisy analog; pristine digital. Vintage analog; sleek digital.

In this article, we break down the real difference between analog and digital – and what that means for the pedals of today.

What’s in a signal?

To understand the difference between analog and digital pedals, you first need to understand what those pedals are working with. The audio from your electric guitar is a small, variable AC voltage generated by the movement of its strings across its electromagnetic pickups and is directly equivalent to the sound of the strings.

It’s this voltage that amplifiers, well, amplify – and it’s this voltage that pedals make changes to. The method by which those changes are made is what we’re looking at today.

Anatomy of analog

Analog pedals make changes to your guitar’s signal by passing it through discrete electronic components, each of which has different properties. The signal that leaves an analog pedal, though altered, is the exact same signal that came in.

Distortion pedals were among the first analog pedals made, using the limitations of transistors – the small-scale, solid-state replacement for the vacuum tube – to artificially clip the peaks and troughs of incoming signals.

Successive transistor stages continue to amplify the signal, eventually reaching saturation; soft clipping from saturation creates a warmer, more musical sound, while hard clipping creates the buzz-saw (or Velcro-esque) sound of harsher fuzz. Diodes can also hard-clip signals and are often deployed after gain stages for a little extra bite.

Resistors and capacitors, when placed in the right configurations, can make frequency-sensitive alterations to sound. They constitute filter circuits, which can be used to shape your guitar’s tone or the character of an effect. These, in tandem with cascading transistor-based distortion circuits, are the make-up of practically every dirt pedal you’ve ever touched.

Time-based pedal effects came next, as manufacturers sought to replicate the magic of tape delays and spring reverbs in circuit form. Success came through Moore’s Law – the exponential increase in transistor counts in ICs (integrated circuits).

Early analog delay and reverb effects were created with “bucket brigade” ICs, or BBDs, that used arrays of capacitors and transistors to sample, slow, or smear the shifting voltages of the guitar’s signal against itself. Such circuits are also responsible for chorus and phase effects, which come from minuscule time divisions between dry and affected signals.

Iconic analog pedals

There are a great many iconic analog pedals, being that so many were responsible for so many idiosyncratic – and wildly popular – sounds. For instance, pretty much every well-regarded distortion pedal is an analog classic.

The Dunlop Fuzz Face was an early fuzz pedal, championed by the likes of Jimi Hendrix. Electro-Harmonix’s Big Muff spawned a thousand variants, clones and successors, as well as the fulsome tones of David Gilmour’s guitar on Pink Floyd’s Animals, and Billy Corgan’s riffs on Smashing Pumpkins’ Siamese Dream. Time-based analog effects are no different, of course.

Electro-Harmonix’s Memory Man was among the first analog delay pedals to market and was responsible for, amongst other sounds, The Edge’s early tone in U2.

Dissecting digital

Digital pedals, meanwhile, use the power of computation to alter sounds. The signal from your guitar is converted from voltages into ones and zeros, typically using something called an ADC (Analog-Digital Converter) that feeds into a microcontroller or small computer chip. From there, the character of the sound can be changed algorithmically, using code.

The first digital pedals were, effectively, miniaturisations of larger rack effects units, made possible again by the ever-shrinking, ever-duplicating transistor. As smaller and more complex pedal-friendly microchips were made possible, so too did it become possible to generate effects otherwise impossible with discrete components: reverb emulations, crystal-clear digital delays and complex pitch-shifting.

Dazzling digital devices (and how they got better)

In 1983, the Boss DD-2 was the first digital delay to enter the stompbox format, marking the effective birth of a new approach to guitar effects. The better chips got, the more digital time-based pedals were capable of; by 1999, the Line6 DL4 was on the market, with its extensive looping and time-stretching capabilities (and with some compelling analog delay emulations too). Why, then, did digital get a bad rap?

In the ’90s, a host of digital multi-effects pedals would launch with the beginner guitarist in mind – the most (in)famous being DigiTech’s RP-1 and Zoom’s 505. Nestled between some semi-capable delay and chorus patches were some of the least inspiring digital-emulation distortions and amp tones a guitarist could ask for.

In certain guitar circles, the preconceived notions that ‘digital=bad’ endure today, despite digital audio technology having come on leaps and bounds – and despite digital delays, reverbs and the DigiTech Whammy (a classic pitch-shifter, used handily by Tom Morello, Jack White and Dimebag Darrell to name but three) having been excellent the whole time.

Today’s digital effects are a world away from those of the ’80s and ’90s, as contemporary digital devices contain entire microcomputers capable of ever more complex algorithms and ever higher audio fidelity – hence the explosion of amp modelers in the past decade.

Hybrid theory

As such, today, it’s not so much a matter of analog vs digital in the pedal world. Digital audio technology is reliably emulating analog tones and technologies to the point of indistinguishability. For another, analog and digital have already been sharing chassis for some time now.

One of the pioneers in this new, harmonious world of analog-digital hybridity is Chase Bliss, the boutique pedal outfit responsible for the Warped Vinyl, Condor HiFi, the recent Automatone series and countless others. Chase Bliss’ slogan is ‘digital brain, analog heart’, speaking to the design smarts behind most of its pedal: all-analog signal paths, with digital control for finer, more accurate and more extensive tweakability.

This is a lesson well-learned by other pedal brands, who are embracing the melding of analog and digital circuits – and embracing the fact that digital effects no longer amount to pale imitations. Boss’ DM-101 is proof positive of this concept hitting the mainstream, being an extensively-featured analog delay with precise digital control. More pedal makers are embracing the possibilities of MIDI and CV too – a topic for another time.

With this whistlestop tour of pedals, their innards and their variably-earned reputations, maybe your pedalboard’s gained a little more luster – and maybe that digital delay you’ve got at the back of your pedal shelf deserves a little more love. Even the Zoom 505 is welcome. Just about.

Pedals Week 2026: Shoegaze is well and truly back. The return of legendary figures to the touring circuit – My Bloody Valentine chief amongst them – has been a heartening thing, demonstrating the continued, vibrant and powerful relevance of the blissed-out guitar as a mode of unreal expression.

These new upwellings of legacy acts are also a reflection of shoegaze’s long and aptly slow second act – newer artists like Glixen, Mo Dotti and They Are Gutting A Body Of Water woozily picking up the mantle left by the likes of Cocteau Twins, The Jesus And Mary Chain and Slowdive, spurred on by the runaway successes of their era.

Even outside of the nu-gaze scene, shoegaze tones have caught on with more mainstream indie and rock torch-bearers, from Wet Leg to Turnstile. But what makes the shoegaze tone? Well, in a nutshell: distortion, modulation, reverb – lots of each, and not quite in that order.

Shoegaze pedalboards are famously well-populated things, Kevin Shields’ small village of floor- and rack-based effects king amongst them. The typical shoegaze sound is heavily distorted guitars, pitch-modulated in some form or another, and smeared by large reverbs placed before them in the chain.

That placement is the defining aspect of a shoegaze tone, in that the huge trails from the reverb compound saturate and swell around the playing at its core – making for a febrile wall of untamed sound. Though the shoegaze tone is broadly easy to recognize, there are countless iterations of it and even more ways to achieve it.

Below you'll find 5 pedals that'll get you into the right spacey ballpark, from do-it-all multi-effects to lush reverbs, glitchy delays, and a must-have My Bloody Valentine signature pedal.

Keeley Loomer

Keeley Electronics’ Loomer is a dual-footswitch multi-effects pedal that combines fuzz, reverb, delay, and modulation into an extremely transparent love letter to everything that jangles, saturates, and otherwise overwhelms.

There are three core reverbs to choose from, each of which has a corresponding amuse-bouche of an effect: hall with shimmer; reverse with vibrato; soft-focus with parallel delays. The fuzz circuit is a Big Muff-of-sorts; big, beefy op-amp distortion with a powerful filter sweep for tone control. A push-button switch on the back lets you switch the order of fuzz and reverb, but for shoegaze, you want reverb first, always.

Fender Shields Blender

What pedal could be better-equipped for shoegaze than one co-designed by Kevin Shields? The Fender Shields Blender is a contemporary remake of the gold-dust ‘70s fuzz-octaver, viewed through a My Bloody Valentine-y lens and tinkered with accordingly. It keeps the same core circuitry as traced from Shields’ own OG Blender but also adds some equally incredible and oblique modes of control.

The Fender Shields Blender contains multitudes, figuratively and literally – what with the two flavors of octave fuzz that run in parallel, the now-optional octave-up, and a whole new control surface just for voltage sag. With so many tonal differentiations at your feet, this is a real Swiss army knife for shoegazery.

Walrus Audio Melee

Walrus Audio’s Melee pedal is another exceedingly swanky dual-effect distortion-and-reverb device, and another immensely handy shortcut to shoegaze. It’s a fuzz and a three-mode reverb, the three modes being Ambient, Octave Down and Reverse With Feedback (all, in one way or another, shoegaze in a box). The fuzz and verb can have their order swapped by a toggle switch, and a Sustain footswitch allows you to both latch reverb pads and swell your trails.

Even accounting for all of that goodness, the Melee’s key USP is something else entirely: that massive joystick on the top-right. It’s an XY controller that gives you precise and expressive control over the blend of fuzz and ‘verb. All the better for dialing in just the right volume of inscrutable trails….

Read more: Full Walrus Audio Melee review

Catalinbread FX40 Soft Focus Reverb

Catalinbread’s FX40 Soft Focus reverb quite literally captures the sound of shoegaze history for pedalboard-friendly delivery to a new generation of ‘gazers. It’s a replication of the ‘Soft Focus’ reverb patch found on the Yamaha FX500 – a ‘90s studio rack processor used heavily on Slowdive’s Souvlaki, amongst other quintessentially dreamy ‘90s records.

The Soft Focus is a big plate-style reverb with some lush modulatory goodness stashed within. The plate reverb meets three parallel channels – one clean, one with an octave-up, and one with a multi-voice chorus – for a blended tone that shimmers and moves in highly idiosyncratic fashion.

Old Blood Noise Endeavors Parting

Shoegaze has always been about tonal experimentation. And the second wave of shoegaze has coincided quite handily with what might be described as the second wave of glitch pedals, as evidenced by Old Blood Noise Endeavours’ pedal collab with harpist Emily Hopkins, Parting.

To make a long story short, Parting is glitchy, random ambiance via a delay/verb and Fun With Samples. It’s an inscrutable box of chance, incorporating downsampling, LFO-based modulation, delay, and reverb. It’s capable of everything from zippy reverse-sample soundscapes to smeared (there is literally a knob labeled ‘Smear’) verby beds. Three-dimensional lushness abounds.

Pedals Week 2026: The stompbox does not belong in these times. A crude metal brick studded with switches and dials, its scuffed footswitch still bearing your bootprint from last night’s gig, its innards a tangle of wires and solder globs – the format is a far cry from the intangible, unknowable sleekness of modeling software.

But perhaps that’s why stompboxes have endured – even flourished – on the modern scene. “People still love turning knobs,” shrugs Reverb’s Senior Director of Analytics, Cyril Nigg, as he prepares to mine the data for GW’s week-long celebration of pedals. “There's just something very satisfying about looking down and seeing your chain of effects and dialling it in. With stompboxes, it's cause and effect, right? I love it. And I'm guessing you love it too.”

What’s the overall health of the pedal market in 2026?

“First of all, people still love pedals. Y’know, we’re selling thousands a day on Reverb. There’s been 100 new pedals released so far this year, so it’s still a thriving market. It’s hard to find a brand-new pedal that hasn’t got more expensive over the last five years. Cost of materials, tariffs, labor costs, all of those things have gone up.

“But then, if you look at the used market, prices have actually been pretty steady. And we know this because we built the Reverb price index, which shows millions of transactions since 2018, just to help us understand how the whole market is moving.”

What pedal categories are selling best in 2026?

“Prices on vintage and rare pedals – y’know, things primarily made in the ’70s through the ’90s, like a Moogerfooger or a Dallas Arbiter Fuzz – are up about 20% year over year, and 50% higher than pre-pandemic. And then, if you look at effects categories: overdrive, distortion, fuzz, that group is all up about 25% since 2019.

“Delays have done well, they’re up about 15% in that period. Of the four main modulation categories, flange has always been the least popular and chorus is still number one by far. But tremolo used to be number two until, like, 2020, when the phaser overtook it.”

Which specific pedals do people want in 2026?

“One that’s definitely come up, especially recently, is the Analog Man King Of Tone. They’re still a boutique builder and they’ve kept that supply limited. To get a new one, you have to email Mike Piera, and I’ve been on the waiting list for a while now. So prices have gone [up sharply]. He sells them for, like, $350 direct, but they regularly sell for over $750 now, and they’ll go up even more if he stops producing them.

“That’s certainly one of the iconic pedals to have. Then there’s the Klons: the KTR and the Horsie/Centaur, those are always in high demand. The Nobels ODR-1, especially the ’90s version, which became the Nashville session pedal – those are selling for, like, $1,000.

“Other things like a Shin-ei Uni-Vibe: you’ll get about $2,500 to $3,000 for those. Of course, there’s the original Roland Space Echo, and the Dallas Arbiter Germanium Fuzz Face will go for around $3,000.”

How expensive can a pedal get on Reverb?

“We regularly sell pedals for thousands of dollars. We’ve certainly sold some original Klons for over 10 grand. And pedals with provenance or a story behind it, something that’s been owned by an artist, or really early serial numbers, those command an even higher price. Recently, Denmark Guitars in London sold Kurt Cobain’s original ’80s BOSS DS-1, used both live and in the studio during Nirvana’s Nevermind era [for $9,748].”

What are the hottest eras of production?

“I think there’s two primary periods. There’s the early days, from the late-’60s into the late-’70s. So y’know, the original Fuzz Face, Uni-Vibe, Space Echo, Mu-Tron, the early wahs, Tone Benders, all that stuff that the Stones, Hendrix, Pete Townshend and these guys used.

“Then it kinda leapfrogs into the ’90s, when you get brands like Nobels, Lovetone, some of the early Way Huge pedals. That ’90s era that has gotten very popular, almost in line with the classic ’60s and ’70s stuff.”

How about the big losers in the pedal market?

“One category that has certainly gone down is multi-effects, which are down about 15% since 2019 and 5% year over year. There’s probably two things driving that. One is the rise of amp modelers. If you’re looking at a Neural DSP, Axe-FX or Fractal, they operate not only as an amp in a box, but also a multi-effects.

“Also, with multi-effects pedals, the technology kinda goes out of out of favor. Like, the newest version of a multi-effects usually has better engines, the sounds are better, they’ve evolved the interface.

“But if you go back a few years, those multi-effects units just don’t sound as good. Whereas, with an individual stompbox, a lot of the good ones are analog, and even the digital ones, they’ve really honed in the sound, and it does its job really well.

“I haven’t really seen that amp modelers have impacted the popularity of individual pedals. Based on the data we see, a lot of people are buying both individual pedals and amp modeling units. Also, people will often have two or three rigs: maybe a traditional setup, and then, if they’re playing gigs, they might recreate that on an Axe-FX or Neural DSP Quad Cortex.”

Have any companies bucked the trend?

“Hologram Electronics are interesting, because they’ve really kept their catalog pretty limited, and one of their best-selling pedals is the Chroma Console, which is actually a multi-effects unit. It’s usually in our top 20 best-selling pedals, but it’s going against the grain. Whereas most other multi-effects are trying to hang on, that one has actually done really well.”

Have any iconic pedals cooled in popularity?

“I’ll put this one out there. The Klon Horsie: they’re still, like, $5,000, so it’s not like there’s not a lot of demand. But at the peak of the pandemic, they were closer to $6,000 or $7,000. So they’ve certainly come down from their peak. They’re still legendary, but people aren’t willing to pay quite as much as they once were. But there’s not many examples of legendary pedals falling off.”

What’s your advice for buying and selling pedals on Reverb?

“Pedals are one of the easiest things to sell. They retain their value well, they’re pretty indestructible, they’re easy to ship. Make sure you price it correctly, using Reverb’s price guide. That’s the most important thing. And then, taking good pictures, being honest about the condition, saving the box and accessories – those things always help.

“On the buyer side, if you have a specific pedal you’re looking for – say, a Lovetone Big Cheese – set up a save search to get notified when anyone lists one or it gets a price drop. You often have to act quickly. And don’t be afraid to make offers. On Reverb, most of the sellers are open to that.

“I’d also say that pedals are one of the best ways to get a different sound without spending a lot of money. Particularly if you buy used. You could spend, like, 50 to 100 bucks, buy a chorus pedal and a DS-1, and get Kurt Cobain’s sound. Or plug in a Phase 90 and sound like Waylon Jennings or Eddie Van Halen – with the right touch.”

Finally, if you could invest in any pedal, what would you choose?

“Right now, maybe an Analog Man King Of Tone. But of course, an original Fuzz Face. It’s so iconic. I grew up wanting to sound like Hendrix, and you see that big red pedal and it conjures up that sound in your mind…”

• Check out to Reverb’s price guide for more insight on pedal price trends.

Pedals Week 2026: If you’ve ever wondered what MIDI can do for your guitar rig, this is the guide you’ve been looking for. MIDI isn’t just for synth nerds. It can add incredible flexibility to your setup, particularly for live players looking to cut down on tap dancing. It can also get you the kind of seamless tone changes normally reserved for pro touring players.

In this guide, I’ll take you through everything you need to know about MIDI, the hardware and connectivity you’ll need, and some examples of how to get it set up on your own rig. It might take an afternoon to get your head around, but once that’s done, you’ll unlock some seriously cool functionality from your pedals.

What is MIDI?

Let’s get one thing straight: MIDI isn’t audio. MIDI stands for Musical Instrument Digital Interface, and at its core, it is a communication protocol for sending signals from one piece of hardware to another. For guitarists, this means you can send a signal that changes a preset on your multi-effects pedal, or even just changes a single setting, like turning up the gain on an overdrive pedal, or adjusting individual EQ knobs.

Back in the ’80s, synth players were growing frustrated at having loads of gear that couldn’t talk to each other. If you bought a synth from Roland, it wouldn’t work with one from Oberheim or Sequential. Ikutaro Kakehashi, then president of Roland, recognized that this issue was limiting the growth of the electronic musical instrument industry, and together with Dave Smith from Sequential, came up with a standard protocol that would allow universal communication. Thus, MIDI was born.

MIDI sequencing enabled musicians with no formal training to create complex arrangements, making music creation far more accessible to the masses. It also allowed a smaller group of musicians to sound like a much bigger group, revolutionizing live performances.

MIDI also coincided with another significant tech development: the personal computer. The combination of MIDI and PCs meant that home recording became far more accessible for your average Joe, without having to use expensive studio equipment.

MIDI & guitars

MIDI had two large effects on the world of guitar. The first camp was those who wanted to turn the guitar into a synthesizer. Suddenly, you could make your guitar sound like a violin or a lush pad on a synthesizer. Players like Allan Holdsworth, Pat Metheny, and Jerry Garcia utilized these to varying degrees, producing some pretty wild effects and some absolutely crazy-looking guitars.

Using pitch to MIDI, you could now send the dynamic signal of an electric guitar, convert it to 1s and 0s, and send it on to a synthesizer to completely transform the sound. This required a hexaphonic pickup, which tracked each string individually in order to prevent the computer from getting confused by so many incoming signals.

The other camp, and the one that is more relevant to today's guitarist, is the rig controllers. Players like The Edge needed a way to manage their ginormous setups with multiple amps, pedals, and rackmount gear more easily, and MIDI systems provided a way to do that.

MIDI foot controllers allowed them to change multiple parameters at once, switching amp tones and multiple patch settings on their rack gear seamlessly, without having to bend down and turn knobs or have someone backstage do the changes manually. It completely revolutionized what guitarists were able to do onstage when it came to controlling masses of effects.

MIDI protocol

How does MIDI actually work? Let’s break it down. There are two main types of MIDI communication:

• Control Change (CC): This is typically used for parameter changes within a preset. For example, turning up the delay time on a delay pedal.
• Program Change (PC): This is used for wider changes like switching to a completely different preset on a multi-effects pedal.

When you send a MIDI CC signal from a foot controller to your hardware, you’ll be sending what’s called a three-byte package. For MIDI PC signals, it only uses the first two bytes to send a signal.

For guitarists, the three-byte package will look something like this:

• Byte 1: The type of message it is and what channel it’s on. For example, “this is a Control Change (CC) message, sending on channel 4.” This means anything not on channel 4 will ignore the message. With a MIDI controller, you get a total of 16 channels to send signals over.
• Byte 2: Each knob, switch, or function on a guitar pedal will have a MIDI CC number assigned, from 0 to 127. Byte 2 will send a MIDI CC number from the foot controller to engage that particular knob, switch, or function. In this example, we want to change the mix knob of our delay pedal, which might be CC number 15.
• Byte 3: This is the value you want to change the parameter to. This also operates the MIDI CC from 0 to 127, so sticking with our delay pedal example, 0 would be the mix knob all the way down, and 127 would be the mix knob all the way up. You can then set this to whatever level you like, adding in more of your delayed sound for a particular section of your song.

As you’re able to send 16 channels with a potential 128 parameters, that totals to 2,048 individual parameters. It means there’s basically no chance of running out of room to send signals in a MIDI system. If you’ve got that many knobs or switches on your pedalboard, please send me a picture!

MIDI hardware

Now you understand how MIDI works and what it does, let’s look at which hardware you can use with MIDI as a guitar player.

MIDI foot controller

The most common use of MIDI by guitar players is the MIDI foot controller. These are pedals with a variety of footswitches, and they usually have a screen so you can see what bank/patch you’re on or which function you’re triggering.

Multi-effects pedal

Many multi-effects pedals also have MIDI already built into them. Units like the Quad Cortex or Helix Stadium can be configured to send MIDI data via their footswitches, so you can control external pedals or hardware whilst using them for your main amp tone.

MIDI receivers

You also need somewhere to send your MIDI data, and there are a few common bits of hardware that you can control with MIDI.

Digital pedals

The most common for guitar players would be a digital effects pedal. Things like reverbs, delays, and modulation pedals are the most typical recipients of MIDI signals.

Guitar amps

Modern guitar amps also often have MIDI ports, which allow you to use a MIDI controller to change the channels. So you could use your multi-effects pedal with a guitar amp, and get that to change the amp channel from clean to dirty at the same time as engaging your delay pedal, and upping the mix knob to 50%.

Laptops

A more modern way to use MIDI is by sending the data to a laptop. This might be to use a guitar plugin live, with the MIDI controller to change presets or parameters. More often, though, especially for big touring bands, they’re using MIDI automation via backing tracks.

In this example, there’s a Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) running on a laptop, and all the changes to the amp and pedals are preprogrammed via MIDI. The backing tracks play, and when the band moves to a new section, for example, going from a big chorus to a clean middle eight, the MIDI track sends the changes to their gear, resulting in a seamless switching of tone.

This is what allows big bands like Muse to put on an amazing live show, running around the stage without having to worry about getting back in time to stomp on their pedals to change their settings for a chorus section or a guitar solo. Obviously, this can go wrong, so most pro bands use two laptops running in unison in case the first one fails.

MIDI connections

You might already have some MIDI-enabled gear, so what should you look for to start setting up your own MIDI rig?

5-pin DIN

This is the classic MIDI connection that’s been in use since the ’80s. It’s a round connector with 5 pins, and these are universal, allowing any gear with the same connections to interact with one another.

TRS MIDI

5-pin DIN connections are quite large, which means you’re only likely to find them on bigger pedals like multi-effects or Strymon workstation pedals. So, TRS (Tip Ring Sleeve) MIDI was born, enabling MIDI functionality using a 1/4-inch or 1/8-inch jack, which it makes it much more usable on compact pedals.

Unfortunately, unlike in the ’80s when companies all agreed on a single format, TRS MIDI varies in its functionality depending on which cable you use. The cables look identical on the outside, but are wired differently on the inside depending on what the manufacturer wants them to do.

• TRS MIDI Type A: This is the most common type of TRS MIDI cable, used by Strymon, Boss, Line 6, Meris, and many others. These are wired so that the Tip sends the data and the Ring sends the power. Note that the power isn’t to power pedals, but rather a small voltage required to send the MIDI data.
• TRS MIDI Type B: It’s unlikely you’ll encounter this as a guitarist, but it’s worth knowing about. Type-B cables are often used by synths and MIDI controllers, and here the data is sent down the Ring with the power down the Tip, so if you tried to use this cable with a modern pedal, it won’t work. It just means you need to be careful when buying TRS MIDI cables that you’re getting a Type A rather than a Type B.
• Chase Bliss: On Chase Bliss pedals, neither Type A nor Type B MIDI cables will work. CB uses a specific wiring where the MIDI data is sent down the Ring, but the Tip is disconnected. This is because Chase Bliss MIDI ports need to act as both MIDI inputs and expression pedal inputs. If you have a Chase Bliss pedal, then you need to buy their specific cable or use a MIDI utility/splitter box that translates the signal for you.

MIDI In/Out/Thru

Confused yet? Just wait, there’s more. Many pedals using the 5-pin DIN system will have a separate MIDI In connector, as well as a MIDI Out and/or Thru. Your MIDI footcontroller might only have a single MIDI Out, so if you want to chain multiple MIDI pedals together, you’ll need to go out from your controller, to the In of your pedal, then use the Out or Thru to go to the next pedal’s MIDI In, and so on and so forth.

The hole goes even deeper as we start to get into TRS MIDI. On some pedals, manufacturers use two 1/8-inch jacks side by side to act as the In and Out/Thru. You might need to dive into your pedal settings to get this to work properly, as by default the Out will need to be reconfigured as a Thru.

You might notice that some of your pedals only feature a single TRS MIDI connector. In this instance, you can’t daisy chain them and instead need to buy an additional MIDI splitter box, which acts as the main hub for all your MIDI pedals. A typical setup would be to run a master 5-pin DIN from your MIDI foot controller to your MIDI splitter box, then send out from here to each individual pedal with a single TRS MIDI connector.

Other MIDI uses

MIDI can do more than just change pedal settings, so here’s some extra functionality you can unlock.

MIDI clock

Syncing your delay and modulation effects with the song’s tempo will make your songs sound a lot more professional, and a MIDI controller can do this automatically. A MIDI clock can be sent by a controller or a DAW and will automatically synchronize all of the pedals in the MIDI ecosystem to the same tempo. This means your delay repeats or tremolo pedals will be exactly in time with the beat.

Don’t worry if you don’t play with a DAW; most MIDI foot controllers also allow you to set a global tap tempo. That way, when your drummer inevitably speeds up the song, you can still make sure all of your pedals are synchronized to the tempo of the track when playing without a click.

MIDI expression

A lot of MIDI foot controllers have a dedicated expression pedal input. Traditionally, an expression pedal controls a single or two functions, so you’d need to get two pedals to control more than one or two pieces of gear. With a MIDI controller, however, you can digitally alter which parameter you want the expression pedal to control.

For example, on the first song of your set list, it can be set to do a traditional wah effect, on the second song it will seamlessly control the time knob on your delay pedal, and so on. You can even program it to change multiple parameters at once, which can unlock some wild sounds you wouldn’t be able to achieve without a MIDI controller.

Common issues

If you’re setting a MIDI rig up for the first time, here’s a few cautionary tales from other players so you can learn from their mistakes.

Omni Mode

Many pedals come set to Omni mode by default, which means they’re listening to all 16 MIDI channels at once. If you chain a couple of pedals together without specifying a channel for them to communicate, you’ll likely find that both pedals change presets at the same time.

To counter this, make sure to find the MIDI channel settings for each pedal and give them their own channel number to communicate over.

MIDI loops

Connecting the MIDI Out of the foot controller to the MIDI In of the pedal is the right way to use MIDI functionality. Many beginners, however, then end up going back from the MIDI Out of the pedal to the MIDI In of the foot controller. This is logical to a guitarist because we’re used to plugging in guitar pedals in this way.

This doesn’t work with MIDI because when communicating with MIDI, we want a one-way stream. If you connect them in this way, you’ll get a feedback loop where the foot controller sends messages to the pedal, which sends back to the controller, which then passes it back on to the pedal, resulting in crashes or freezes.

The only time you would be likely to use both the MIDI ports on your controller is when integrating a rack processor like the Kemper or Axe-Fx. Here you might want to send data like the tuner from the rack unit to make it visible on your controller, or to align preset names so you know which song setting you’re on. This requires a more advanced setup to enable bi-directional communication between the two without getting the feedback loop.

Cable compatibility

I mentioned it earlier, but cable compatibility is one of the biggest issues guitarists run into. When you type ‘TRS MIDI cable’ into Amazon, it’s not always clear which one you’re getting. Make sure you check the specifications or title so that you’re getting a Type-A cable, as Type-B cables typically don’t work with guitar gear.

MIDI 2.0

You may have heard of MIDI 2.0, and for now it’s primarily within the realm of synthesizers and DAWs. It’s worth mentioning here however as eventually it will become the norm for guitarists with pedalboards.

As I mentioned before, MIDI communication typically works as a one-way street. With MIDI 2.0, bidirectional communication becomes much easier. This means that in the future, you can plug a MIDI controller into a guitar pedal, and it will automatically know things like CC maps and preset names, so you won’t have to program them in manually.

MIDI currently works with the 0 to 127 parameters, so for some effects with really fine control, you might notice small ‘steps’ as it ramps up. This is sometimes called ‘zipper noise’. MIDI 2.0 has 32-bit resolution, so zipper noise disappears as there are billions of steps in MIDI 2.0.

MIDI 2.0 also features up to 256 channels, which, while it isn’t that useful for guitar players, can open up more options for big bands running super-complex MIDI setups. If you’ve got a single laptop running a huge group of musicians, you won’t be limited by MIDI channels any longer.

Finally, MIDI 2.0 is backwards compatible, so it will recognize MIDI 1.0 devices automatically. It means all the MIDI gear we have now won’t suddenly become obsolete when the music industry moves to MIDI 2.0 at a larger scale.

Conclusion

Still with me and excited by the possibilities of MIDI now? Well, my advice would be to start small first. Use one controller for one pedal, changing one parameter. MIDI can be a real minefield when you start introducing multiple components, so starting small will save you a lot of headaches in the long run.

Once you’ve got one thing working, you can build on top of this to create an automated rig that will up your live playing to the level of the pros. It’s one of those things that takes a while to set up, but you will absolutely reap the benefits once you get your head around it.

Pedals Week 2026: Before the late 1990s, your options for guitar pedals were pretty limited. You either bought a mass-produced, assembly-line stompbox, or you spent a fortune hunting down old vintage gear that might just die on you mid-gig. If you wanted a truly unique sound, you basically had to burn your fingers with a soldering iron and mod it yourself.

Then, everything changed when a quiet revolution started bubbling up from basement workbenches. A small group of circuit tweakers and tone chasers began pulling apart classic designs, swapping in premium components, and focusing entirely on touch-sensitive dynamics.

What started as a niche DIY hobby quickly exploded into a massive industry that completely changed how we sculpt electric guitar tone.

Here are 12 of the definitive stompboxes that built the boutique pedal boom.

1. Pete Cornish P-2 / Precision Fuzz

Hand-built in the UK since 1983, Pete Cornish originally created the Precision Fuzz (later named the P-2) specifically for Pink Floyd's David Gilmour. It delivers a massive, violin-like sustain and rich, creamy distortion that completely eliminates the sputtering harshness of traditional vintage fuzzes.

Players love this pedal because its proprietary, studio-grade active buffer preserves total signal integrity, keeping the massive wall of sound entirely noise-free. Combining classic-rock history with serious engineering, the P-2 cuts through a dense band mix with a tight low-end and a singing note bloom that responds naturally to your pick attack.

2. Klon Centaur

The mythical Klon Centaur is the most talked-about pedal of the boutique gear movement. Hand-built by Bill Finnegan, this transparent overdrive is famous for being incredibly rare, very expensive, and – outside of perhaps the Tube Screamer – the most cloned circuit in guitar history.

Sonically, it blends an 18-volt clean boost with overdrive to add massive headroom, a harmonically rich mid-range push, and a singing, touch-sensitive crunch. Using an internal voltage trick to unleash massive headroom and a sweet midrange push, its known for making a tube amp sound and feel alive while preserving its natural tone.

3. Menatone Red Snapper

Before "transparent overdrive" became a marketing buzzword, Brian Mena helped invent the concept from scratch. Launching Menatone in 1996, his flagship Red Snapper circuit debuted as a direct alternative to mid-heavy, tone-coloring overdrive pedals.

Engineered to preserve the natural chime and character of a player’s guitar and amplifier, it delivers an incredibly organic breakup. Its highly responsive "Bite" and "Cut" controls allowed guitarists to sculpt high-end dynamics without adding unwanted compression.

As one of the earliest point-to-point hand-wired pedals of the 1990s, it laid down the blueprint for the transparent dirt pedal movement.

4. Analogman King of Tone

The King of Tone is a legendary forefather of the boutique pedal boom. Inspired by the vintage Marshall Bluesbreaker circuit, this dual-channel pedal acts as a transparent extension of your rig.

It doesn't compress your signal or add a harsh mid-hump; instead, it stacks harmonic grit onto your existing tone while keeping your low-end intact and pick attack crisp.

It became iconic for this touch-sensitive clarity, but also for a multi-year waitlist so absurdly long it’s a running industry joke, proving that this benchmark handmade circuit is truly worth the decade-long wait.

5. Fulltone Full-Drive 2

Inspired by the thick, mid-forward crunch of a classic Tube Screamer, this heavy-duty blue box was hand-built in the mid 1990s as a rugged, premium alternative for touring players.

It featured clean true bypass switching and an independent "Boost" footswitch that pushed the circuit into a thick, singing lead tone for solos.

By delivering great dynamic touch-sensitivity without squashing your guitar's natural voice, this workhorse became a mandatory pedalboard staple and one of the forefathers of the early boutique boom.

6. Keeley Electronics Compressor

The Keeley Compressor completely changed how guitarists looked at utility pedals, proving that studio-grade compression could actually work on a pedalboard.

Prior to its release, most guitar compressors were just tone-suckers that added tons of noise and flattened your playing dynamics. Robert Keeley solved this by using high-fidelity, ultra-quiet components that smooth out your dynamics while keeping a snappy, musical feel.

It gives you great, singing sustain without coloring your core tone, making it an "always-on" essential for touring pros.

7. Paul Cochrane Timmy

Released in the early 2000s, this legendary overdrive completely rewrote the rules for the transparent dirt market.

Frustrated by pedals that aggressively chopped off a guitarist's low-end, Paul Cochrane designed a circuit featuring a post-gain clipping structure and subtractive bass and treble cuts. Instead of adding tons of mids, the Timmy pushes a tube amp into natural breakup while keeping its core tone completely intact.

It became legendary because it gave players total control over their frequencies, making it a permanent staple that helped define the early boutique pedal movement.

8. Way Huge Red Llama

Jeorge Tripps was an absolute trailblazer of the early 1990s boutique scene. Operating out of his garage, Tripps built the Red Llama using a digital CMOS inverter chip uniquely configured as a raw audio amplifier.

The resulting tone was a ferocious, touch-sensitive overdrive that effortlessly crossed the line into fuzzy, speaker-tearing saturation when pushed hard.

With just volume and drive controls, this quirky, high-output monster proved that handmade boutique designs didn't need to be overly complicated or sterile to be brilliantly effective rock and roll tools.

9. Hermida Audio Zendrive

While early pedal builders experimented with capturing Howard Dumble’s mythical amplifier tone, Alfonso Hermida’s 2004 Zendrive perfected it.

Hand-soldering the initial units straight out of his garage, the aerospace engineer built a touch-sensitive masterpiece designed to replicate the ultra-smooth overdrive of fusion guitarist Robben Ford.

Its brilliance lies in a raw, hand-wired clipping circuit paired with a "Voice" control that sculpts precise mid-range frequencies.

By offering a flawless, dynamically responsive "Dumble-in-a-box" experience built on a home workbench, this handmade masterpiece defined an entirely new genre of boutique tone-shaping history.

10. JHS Pedals Morning Glory

Josh Scott started JHS by repairing and modifying pedals by hand at a small kitchen table. That backyard grit led straight to the Morning Glory, a gold box that perfected the art of the transparent overdrive.

Acting as a transparent low-gain drive, it adds a musical layer of chime, top-end clarity, and grit without altering your amplifier's natural voice. It swaps out the muddy mid-hump of old-school overdrives for a crisp, high-fidelity response that lets your pick attack shine.

Highly responsive and incredibly touch-sensitive, this workhorse quickly became a permanent pedalboard staple and a definitive modern classic.

11. B.K. Butler / Chandler Tube Driver

Frustrated by the artificial, thin clipping of early 1980s solid-state dirt boxes, engineer B.K. Butler took matters into his own hands. Hand-soldering real vacuum tubes directly into an instrument-level stompbox circuit, Butler developed the Tube Driver.

Originally distributed via Chandler Industries in the mid-1980s, this discrete, hand-wired unit supplied authentic, high-voltage tube saturation, sag and rich low-end focus to conventional clean amplifiers.

Famously adopted by Eric Johnson for his legendary violin-like lead tone and David Gilmour for Pink Floyd’s late-era stadium runs, it pioneered the modern, premium "amp-in-a-box" boutique pedal genre.

12. Z.Vex Effects Fuzz Factory

Released in 1995, Zachary Vex’s Fuzz Factory turned the guitar world upside down by proving that boutique pedals didn’t have to just recreate the past.

Built around a pair of New Old Stock germanium transistors, this wild five-knob circuit completely abandoned traditional tone-shaping.

By giving players direct control over transistor bias and stability, it unlocked everything from Velcro-like sputter and gating to infinite, self-oscillating theremin shrieks.

It became an instant icon for players looking to push sonic boundaries, cementing Z.Vex as a brilliant, mad-scientist pioneer of the early handmade pedal movement.

Strymon may have just unveiled the pinnacle of delay pedal design with the TimeLine MX Multi Delay – an astonishingly feature-packed workstation that looks to blow the competition out of the water.

However, all that innovation comes at a cost: the TimeLine MX will cost you $679. So, not only is it perhaps the most advanced delay pedal of all time, it could also be the most expensive.

To put that into perspective, its predecessor, the TimeLine Multi Delay, weighed in at $449.

Elsewhere on the market, the Meris LVS Modular Delay costs around $599, the Line 6 DL4 MKII is priced at $299, and the Boss DD-500 will set you back $399.

But make no mistake – the TimeLine MX Multi Delay isn’t your average delay pedal. This isn’t for your standard slapbacks or springs (though, at $649, you can bet it would do those effects just fine).

Instead, this is for the delay connoisseurs out there – the pedal aficionados who make delay experimentation and layered echoes a core part of their playing style. For many players, it will be simply too much. In the right hands, though, it could be the only delay pedal you’ll ever need – and then some.

“And then some” is accurate, because this thing is jammed with features. It has 12 delay engines, two of which can be run at once for the first time. A new OLED display has been updated. Three footswitches. Nine control knobs. Did we mention the five-minute stereo looper? Yeah, it’s got one of those.

It’s a dizzying spec sheet to scroll through. Elsewhere, there are new sounds in the form of Oil Can and Drum Echo, and Spectral. The latter is a glitchy granular delay for oddball textures, while the former are vintage-y delays.

There’s also more power under the hood, courtesy of a tri-core MHz ARM processor, to keep everything ticking over, and fully expansive series, parallel, and split routing options with full stereo and MIDI support.

“It’s taken a long time, but the day is finally here”, says Gregg Stock, Strymon’s CEO and analog guru. “I’m really proud of the entire group that worked on this project and what they’ve accomplished.

“It takes a diverse collection of talented folk to create a product like this, and everyone brought their ‘A’ game to work every day.”

It’s a delay pedal built for professionals and one that has likely raised the bar for the market. But with a price tag that reaches into multi-effects territory, it's likely to pique the interest of only the most ardent delay fans.

The TimeLine MX Multi Delay is available now for $679.

Head over to Strymon for more.

A judge has granted Boss’ motion to dismiss after Behringer hit the company with a lawsuit over the use of polyphonic tuning technology.

In March, Empower Tribe, the owner of Behringer and TC Electronic, filed a lawsuit against Boss parent company, Roland, claiming the latter had produced a “knock off” version of its patented polyphonic tuner.

At the time, Boss removed the polyphonic tuner function from many of its flagship modeler pedals, including the GT-1000, GT-1000CORE, GX-100 and GX-10, pending litigation.

Boss filed a motion to dismiss, arguing that Behringer’s original patent for polyphonic tuning – first used in the TC Electronic PolyTune pedal in 2011 – fell short on key criteria.

Specifically, Boss’ motion stated that the polyphonic tuning failed to adequately show the “inventive concept”, which is required for patents.

The judge residing over the case agreed. In court documents, it was asserted that Empower Tribe had failed to justify its patent despite attempts to protect its existence. Roland therefore could not be penalized as the patent was unenforceable in the eyes of the court.

“The Court agrees that nothing in the claim limitations, considered individually and together as a whole, is sufficient to transform the Asserted Claims into a patent-eligible invention,” the court says.

“Because the Court finds that the Asserted Claims are directed to an abstract idea and lack an inventive concept to transform the Asserted Claims, the Court grants the Motion.”

The court has also said it would be “futile” to allow Empower Tribe to amend its complaint, owing to the fact that patent-ineligibility is a “defect which cannot be cured through amendment”.

As such, Behringer’s Complaint has been dismissed with prejudice, and in doing so may have just set a precedent for the open use of polyphonic tuners elsewhere. Now that the polyphonic tuning patent is unenforceable, Empower Tribe seemingly no longer holds a monopoly on multi-string tuning.

It’s the latest legal tangle for Behringer, which was sued by Klon creator Bill Finnegan last year over its $69 Centaur Overdrive Klon copy. The lawsuit was dismissed after Behringer introduced a number of name and stylistic changes to the pedal.

Boss has been contacted for comment.

Ernie Ball has made a major play in the effects pedal market by announcing the acquisition of Source Audio.

It’s a significant move from the string maker, which is set to take control of one of the most innovative effects specialists of the past few years.

The acquisition also marks the first time Ernie Ball has branched into the world of premium effects, expanding its scope well beyond its own in-house roster of volume pedals.

Founded in 2006, Source Audio has become a key player in the premium effects market, releasing a broad array of innovative drive, delay, reverb and modulation effects.

Highlights include the Artifakt Lo-Fi Elements, Encounter, ZIO Analog Front End + Boost, and Collider Delay+Reverb.

Source Audio has also earned multiple product and innovation awards over the past two decades, and as per Source Audio's website its pedals can be heard on recordings from the likes of U2, David Gilmour, John Mayer, Aerosmith and more.

“Source Audio has built one of the most creative and respected effects platforms in our industry,” says Brian Ball, CEO of Ernie Ball. “What excites me isn’t just the technology; it’s the way their pedals inspire musicians to find sounds they didn’t know they were looking for.

“Ernie Ball has always existed to help artists create, and Source Audio gives us a powerful new way to do exactly that.”

Ernie Ball’s acquisition could have a knock-on effect for the rest of the market. Source Audio’s credentials have never been in doubt. But if Ernie Ball’s connections can help put its pedals into the hands of more players, then competing premium effects firms such as Strymon, Eventide and Keeley could be faced with a rejuvenated competitor.

Going forward, it will largely be business as usual for Source Audio. It will continue operating under its own brand, but with the backing of Ernie Ball, which will look to scale the company’s profile and appeal.

Existing Source Audio pedals are expected to remain available, with an eye on developing future products and pedals mooted. Don’t expect any Ernie Ball pedals, either. This move will be about increasing Source Audio’s exposure and putting them in the hands of more players.

Roger Smith, CEO and Co-Founder of Source Audio, comments, “Ernie Ball understands musicians, artists, and the culture of guitar in a way very few companies do, and that alignment is what makes this such an exciting next chapter.

“Ernie Ball gives Source Audio the scale, support, and reach to keep growing while preserving the spirit of what we built. I am confident this is the right home for the brand, the products, the technology, and the community of musicians who have supported us from the start.”

Visit Ernie Ball and Source Audio for more.

During the late ’60s, Tom Oberheim earned notoriety among Los Angeles musicians for the ring modulators he built for everyone from the experimental electronic psychedelia band the United States of America to film composer Leonard Rosenman, who used Oberheim’s ring modulator on the soundtrack for 1970’s Beyond the Planet of the Apes.

By 1969, Gibson’s Maestro division contracted Oberheim Electronics to build his ring modulator for them, which was marketed as the Maestro RM-1A.

The ring modulator had limited appeal to the masses (especially after the U.S. government outlawed LSD in 1970), but Oberheim’s follow-up was an incredible success – the PS-1 Phase Shifter, introduced in 1971.

The PS-1 technically wasn’t the first phase shifter on the market (the Shin-ei/Univox Uni-Vibe preceded it by four years), but it was the first effect unit called a “phase shifter” as well as the first to produce the steady rising and falling sweep effect that musicians now recognize as the standard phase shifting effect.

Oberheim designed the PS-1 as a compact substitute for a Leslie rotating speaker cabinet for keyboardists. As a result, it was housed in a rather large, boxy enclosure with only three large rocker switches on the top panel for selecting slow (blue), medium (yellow) and fast (red) sweep speeds.

One especially cool characteristic of the Maestro phase shifter effect is how the LFO speed ramps up or down to the selected rate (similar to the mechanical function of a Leslie) instead of changing abruptly. The unit itself had no bypass switch, but an optional foot controller provided bypass/slow, medium and fast footswitches.

Despite its bulky, keyboard-centric design, the Maestro Phase Shifter quickly gained popularity with guitarists, who were mesmerized by the deep, trippy swirling textures produced by the six-stage circuit where six JFETs provide a cascading all-pass filter network.

Maestro produced three different versions of the Phase Shifter — the PS-1, PS-1A and PS-1B. The PS-1A is basically an improved version of the PS-1 that fixed a flaw with the input buffer amplifier that produced popping noises.

The PS-1B features a variable speed knob, which is a very useful upgrade, but because this version was introduced near the end of Oberheim’s contract with Maestro these units are very rare and command significantly higher prices on the vintage market.

Maestro sold an estimated 60,000 units to guitarists and keyboardists alike during its brief four-year lifespan. When smaller phase shifter pedals emerged around 1974 that were much more guitar rig-friendly, the bulky Maestro unit was soon rendered obsolete.

However, it still sounds great today and is great for studio applications. If you don’t want to bother with a vintage unit, Heptode Virtuoso replicates the Maestro’s vintage tones for players who want a modern pedalboard-friendly update.

Some of the most dedicated early fans of the Maestro Phase Shifter included Ernie Isley, who ran an Electro-Harmonix Big Muff in front of his to create the synth-like lead tone on Isley Brothers classic That Lady; Alex Lifeson, who used his Maestro on the first four Rush albums up to and including 2112; George Harrison, who plugged into a PS-1A on his Extra Texture and Thirty Three & 1/3 albums; Waylon Jennings on numerous mid-’70s outlaw country singles, plus John Cipollina, Steve Howe and Terry Kath.

• This article first appeared in Guitar World. Subscribe and save.

Solar Guitars is the latest firm to enter the hotly contested pitch-shifting market with the Chug Capo, a no-nonsense stompbox being billed as “a digital bi-directional capo” that is set to go toe to toe with the likes of Boss and DigiTech.

The chrome pedal shifts up and down by one octave in semitone increments, has a bright display, and two key selling points.

The first is the promise of low latency performance – weighing in roughly half its rival's – so that “fast tempo right-hand picking and chugging won’t give the feel of your playing dragging.”

Beyond that, Solar says the “sonic integrity” of a player’s tone will not be harmed when shifting the signal. Its voicing has been “meticulously programmed” so that the affected sound the same as an unaltered chord sound.

That’s important for those considering a pitch-shifting pedal as a primarily practical piece of gear. Dropping by, say a whole tone, can help eradicate the need for taking multiple guitars on the road, thus slimming down live rigs.

Elsewhere, the pedal has two modes. Mix offers a “very powerful fast-tracking octave divider,” while a saved preset can be recalled via Fav mode. There’s also the option of plugging in a non-latching switch, which is not included.

Finally, there’s a Mix dial for blending the pitched signal, meaning it can double up as an octave, and a USB-C port on the back for connecting to a computer.

For a good while, the DigiTech Whammy and Drop pedals, alongside Electro Harmonix’s Pitch Fork, were the go-to for on-the-fly transposing. But in recent years, Neural DSP has impressed with the Transpose feature built into its plugins, and Boss did some serious work with its artifact-free XS-1 Poly-Shifter last year. The market has woken up to the need for high-end pitch shifters for bedroom musicians and working guitarists alike.

In certain cases, artifacts have proven a key characteristic of pitch-shifting – it’s why the DigiTech Whammy DT edges out the Boss XS-100 in my opinion – but for pitch-shifting in its purest form, Boss has proven a force to be reckoned with. That means that Solar has to meet a high bar if it is going to stage a successful content.

“This is the fastest and most transparent-sounding pitch shifter to date, especially when it comes to tight rhythm playing, chords, and pinch harmonics,” says firm founder, Ola Englund. These, he adds, “are usually the first things to expose weaknesses in pitch shifters.”

The Chug Capo is priced at $249, which makes it a chunk pricier than the $199 Boss XS-1, which has slightly more features and a wider octave range. The acid test comes down to audio quality alone.

See Solar for more.

JHS Pedals is poised to correct its biggest error after announcing the long-awaited second edition of its DIY Notadümblë pedal will be released tomorrow, Tuesday 30 June.

The second stompbox in the firm’s build-it-yourself category, the Notadümblë V1 made the headlines after JHS Pedals founder Josh Scott realized he’d dropped the ball pretty dramatically.

In short, a schematic mix-up meant the clean boost circuit inserted into the Dumble clone was actually modeled on an even rarer Dumble pedal than advertised. As such, it was discontinued after just two weeks.

With V2, JHS Pedals is not only releasing the pedal as it always meant to, but it’s also introducing some pleasing quality-of-life improvements.

It is now a true two-in-one pedal, with independent footswitches for both the Dumble-style overdrive and boost side. The Presence control has also been promoted to the top control panel.

But most importantly, the boost side now correctly draws from John Mayer’s one-of-one A Box Later pedal.

Other quirks that weren’t in the earlier version include a slider toggle to choose which side of the pedal comes first in the signal path, and an effects loop for its preamp boost circuit.

Controls on the pedal’s face include Volume, Drive, EQ, and Presence for the overdrive, and Input and Outputs for the clean boost, staying true to the streamlined controls on the A Box Later.

The first batch is limited to 6,000 units, but fear not, because this is not a limited edition release. The Notadümblë V2 will be available indefinitely; there might just be a small wait for those not quick enough to snag one from the first drop.

The first batch launched on Tuesday, June 30th at 10 am CST.

See JHS Pedals for more.

JHS Pedals has been busy of late, having dropped the ultimate pedal demo guitar in collaboration with Bilt; a curious, against-the-grain octaver; and the Fumble, which separates the wrongly copied Dumble from V1 into its own unit.

With more and more big manufacturers jumping on the bandwagon, the Amazon Prime Day sales are rapidly becoming a legitimate destination for guitar players looking for a deal. What began as an opportunity to grab cheap accessories and off-brand alternatives has now become a place where even legendary companies like Boss are getting in on the action.

There are absolutely loads of Boss' compact stompboxes in the Prime Day guitar deals at the moment, so if you've got a gap on your pedalboard to fill, then now's a great time to take advantage of some serious savings. Some have dropped even further in price since first being launched, so whether you need an overdrive pedal, some delay effects, a new tuner, or even some utility pedals, there's pretty much something for everyone on offer here.

Here's every single one of the 13 Boss stompboxes currently on sale for Prime Day, but act fast, they won't be around much longer!

All the best places to shop at Amazon

• Amazon: All Prime Day guitar deals
• Guitars: Save on beginner guitars
• Pedals: Cheap multi-effects
• Amps: Money off smart amps
• Strings: Stock up on essentials
• Accessories: Capos, slides, straps, and more

Today's best non-Amazon sales

• Guitar Center: Early-access 4th July sale
• Sweetwater: Big savings on guitar gear
• Musician's Friend: Up to 60% 4th July sale
• Universal Audio: Huge up to 80% off half year sale
• IK Multimedia: 50% off software coupon
• Positive Grid: Giant Spark summer sale
• Fender: Up to $200 off Tone Master
• Guitar Tricks: 1 month for $1
• B&H Photo: Money off pro audio
• Plugin Boutique: 100s of plugin discounts
• Reverb: B-stock deals
• Waves: Plugins for just $34.99

• 🇬🇧 Best UK sales
• Thomann: Huge Music Days sale, up to 60% off
• GuitarTricks: Half-price annual plan
• Plugin Boutique: Huge software savings
• Waves: Sale on studio staples

If you’re searching for a feature-packed multi-effects unit that won’t break the bank, the Mooer GE150 is a deal you can’t ignore. Over the past few years, Mooer has undergone a dramatic transformation, evolving from a brand best known for its affordable micro pedals (often inspired by classic designs) to a genuine force in the world of guitar effects. With flagship releases like the GE300 amp modeler/multi-effects, Mooer has proven it can compete with the big guns. Now, with the GE150 Pro, the company brings its innovative spirit and commitment to value into a compact, affordable package perfect for players at any level – and right now, there’s 35% off at Amazon, making this pedal only $129.

What sets the GE150 apart? For starters, it delivers an astonishing range of tones and features at a price point comfortably below $200. Built on Mooer’s acclaimed MNRS modeling technology, the GE150 comes loaded with 55 amp models derived from the brand’s best-selling Micro Preamp series. That means you get access to a huge library of authentic amp sounds, from sparkling cleans to high-gain heaviness, all at your fingertips.

• Keep up-to-date with our Prime Day guitar deals live blog
• Shop all the best Prime Day guitar deals at Amazon

But the value doesn’t stop there. The GE150 packs in a massive 151 effects, covering everything from lush reverbs and delays to wild modulation and dynamic processors. Want even more sonic flexibility? The unit boasts 26 high-quality cabinet simulations and supports MNRS sample files for both the amp and cab modules (GNR and GIR formats). The AMP module offers 20 slots for loading your own sample files, while the CAB module also provides 20 slots for user customization, making the GE150 one of the most versatile pedals in its class.

For those who want instant inspiration, the GE150 includes 200 factory preset tones, so you can plug in and play right out of the box. Whether you’re a bedroom noodler, a gigging musician, or someone looking for a powerful recording tool, the GE150 offers pro-level sounds and features without the pro-level price tag.

In short, the Mooer GE150 is a must-see deal for any guitarist who wants maximum value, versatility, and tone-shaping power. With its impressive feature set and wallet-friendly price, it’s no wonder the GE150 is making waves in the world of guitar effects.

Shop more Prime Day deals

• All the best places to shop at Amazon
• Amazon: All Prime Day guitar deals
• Guitars: Save on beginner guitars
• Pedals: Cheap multi-effects
• Amps: Money off smart amps
• Strings: Stock up on essentials
• Accessories: Capos, slides, straps, and more

• Today's best non-Amazon sales
• B&H Photo: Money off pro audio
• Guitar Center: Save up to 30% on acoustics
• Guitar Tricks: 1 month for $1
• IK Multimedia: 50% off software
• Musician's Friend: Up to 40% off electrics
• Native Instruments: Up to 30% software savings
• Plugin Boutique: 100s of plugin discounts
• Reverb: B-stock deals
• Sweetwater: Big savings on guitar gear
• Universal Audio: Paradise Guitar studio $99
• Waves: Plugins for just $34.99

When it comes to dialing in guitar tones, I’ll be the first to admit I’m a straight shooter. I like straightforward saturated rock tones, minimal fuss, and as few pedals as possible. I’ve rarely been tempted by massive ambiance or shimmer reverb pedals. But after spending time with the Hotone NC-200 Verbera, I have to admit, my thoughts on do-it-all reverb units have been turned upside down - and better yet, it has 20% off this Prime Day!

This is a dual-engine stomp, loaded up with both real-space impulse response (IR) convolution reverbs and Hotone’s own stellar algorithmic sounds. That means you get everything from lush concert halls and subtle plates to wild, otherworldly textures perfect for atmospheric playing. If you’ve ever found yourself paralyzed by too many options or confused by complicated menus, you’ll be relieved to know that the NC-200 makes it all refreshingly simple. Every knob is clearly marked, and the colorful LED rings let you know exactly what you’re adjusting at a glance.

Even with its deep list of features, the NC-200 is one of the most intuitive pedals I’ve ever used. I braced myself for a labyrinth of submenus and cryptic buttons, but instead, I found a layout that made sense from the get-go. Whether you’re at home, in the studio, or on stage, you can get to any sound you want in seconds, with no manual diving required. That’s a rarity in the world of modern effects.

• Keep up-to-date with our Prime Day guitar deals live blog
• Shop all the best Prime Day guitar deals at Amazon

The NC-200 comes loaded with a staggering 100 presets, and impressively, almost all of them are entirely gig-ready. There are, of course, a few settings that didn’t quite hit the mark for me (the spring reverbs aren’t quite as convincing as the rest), but the ambient, hall, and space options are genuinely inspiring.

Of course, no piece of gear is perfect, and the NC-200 does have a minor quirk. Weirdly, the MIDI jacks are in a rather odd spot. I can’t imagine a scenario where their placement wouldn’t be a bit awkward, either in a pedalboard setup or in the studio. They’re a little too easy to bump or accidentally disconnect. Still, that’s a small nitpick in an otherwise stellar package.

If you’ve ever felt intimidated by the idea of modern reverb pedals, or just wanted a unit that can go from classic to experimental without a learning curve, the Hotone NC-200 Verbera is an easy recommendation. And right now, it’s an even easier decision, as you can save 20% at Amazon, bringing the price down to just $239.99. That’s a killer deal for a pedal this loaded with features and inspiring tones.

Curious to hear more? Check out my full Hotone NC-200 Verbera review and see the pedal in action in the Guitar World demo video linked below. If you’re ready to rethink what a reverb pedal can do, this one might just change your mind, too.

Guitar World takes a closer look at what the Hotone Verbera can do

Shop more Prime Day deals

• All the best places to shop at Amazon
• Amazon: All Prime Day guitar deals
• Guitars: Save on beginner guitars
• Pedals: Cheap multi-effects
• Amps: Money off smart amps
• Strings: Stock up on essentials
• Accessories: Capos, slides, straps, and more

• Today's best non-Amazon sales
• B&H Photo: Money off pro audio
• Guitar Center: Save up to 30% on acoustics
• Guitar Tricks: 1 month for $1
• IK Multimedia: 50% off software
• Musician's Friend: Up to 40% off electrics
• Native Instruments: Up to 30% software savings
• Plugin Boutique: 100s of plugin discounts
• Reverb: B-stock deals
• Sweetwater: Big savings on guitar gear
• Universal Audio: Paradise Guitar studio $99
• Waves: Plugins for just $34.99

Let's face it, cheap pedals can be hit and miss. For every diamond in the rough, there are 8 or 9 that should probably be destined for landfill. With the launch of the Amazon Prime Day sale today, there's a myriad of budget stompboxes available at serious discounts, but which should you get?

Before Prime Day guitar deals even started, the Guitar World team bought 8 of the most talked about cheap pedals on Amazon to put them to the test and find out what they're really good for. We've used them with real tube amps, with a modeling amp, and through an audio interface with guitar plugins to see how they hold up.

Tonally, there's some really great stuff here, especially if you're willing to tweak. You can absolutely use them to record and rehearse. Where they typically fall short of more expensive models, however, is in build quality; they're fine for use on a home pedalboard, but I'd stop short of playing them live.

For the money, it's hard to knock these pedals, especially if you're just building a budget second-home board or you want to try some iconic pedal circuits out without committing to spending hundreds of dollars. Of the 8 pedals we tested, 7 have seen discounts, so here's what we thought of each one. We've also ranked them in order of preference.

Now, it's worth noting that Amazon Prime Day is coming to a close, but as we enter the final day, you still have an opportunity to score a real bargain if you're quick! So if you're eyeing any of these stomps, we suggest you don't hang around, as these deals expire at the end of the day.

Want the most up-to-date information? Keep track with our Prime Day guitar deals live blog.

Shop the full Prime Day sale

• Amazon: All Prime Day guitar deals
• Guitars: Save on beginner guitars
• Amps & pedals: Save big on fresh tones
• Accessories: Strings, slides, straps, and more

More retailer sales

• 🇺🇸 Best US sales
• B&H Photo: Money off pro audio
• Guitar Center: Early 4th of July sale
• Guitar Tricks: 1 month for $1
• IK Multimedia: 50% off software coupon
• Musician's Friend: Up to 60% off gear
• Native Instruments: Up to 30% software savings
• Plugin Boutique: 100s of plugin discounts
• Reverb: B-stock deals
• Sweetwater: Big savings on guitar gear
• Universal Audio: Paradise Guitar studio $99
• Waves: Plugins for just $34.99

• 🇬🇧 Best UK sales
• Thomann: Shop the huge Thomann Music Days sale
• Gear 4 Music: Big clearance savings
• GuitarTricks: Half-price annual plan
• Plugin Boutique: Huge software savings
• Waves: Sale on studio staples

What is it?

Be it overdrive, distortion or fuzz, pedals of a certain nature fall into the catch-all category of ‘dirt’ pedals, and The Joker, the latest offering from Flattley, is certainly of that ilk – it even says so on the front panel! What you have here is a pedal with two toggle-switched modes, the aforementioned Dirt and, to take things a stage further, Filth.

Flattley tells us the pedal was inspired by a simple question: what happens if you add controlled distortion to a normally clean booster? And to that end, the designers developed a pedal with a FET-based 12AX7 valve simulation with the aim of achieving a similar sound to an overdriven single-valve amp.

However, this pedal takes it a stage further by adding the Filth mode for more gain and distortion.

Specs

• Price: £259
• Type: Overdrive pedal
• Origin: UK
• Controls: Volume, Gain, Tone, Dirt/Filth switch, Bypass footswitch
• Features: True bypass
• Power: 9V DC adaptor (not supplied) 50mA
• Contact: Flattley Guitar Pedals

Build quality, usability and sounds

In Dirt mode with the pedal’s Gain knob at minimum, the Volume knob (starting from silence) hits unity gain at around 11 o’clock, so anything beyond that will give you a boost – not squeaky clean but with a touch of grit to it and coloured by whatever you have dialled in on the tone knob.

To our ears, that knob is at its most neutral at minimum position, but advancing it starts rolling off bottom-end, and from the midpoint onwards there’s increasing top-end emphasis, heading right into classic treble-boost territory towards its end point. All good stuff for hitting the front-end of your amp in exactly the right way or pushing another dirt pedal.

When you start advancing the Gain knob there’s plenty of those ‘just beyond clean’ tones to explore as you move through low-level break-up and into the more crunchy arena with the flavour of a small valve amp that’s being driven hard. It’s all very playable with fully exploitable dynamic response, pulling back from the dirt to cleaner tone with a softer touch.

Switching to Filth mode, the starting point is somewhere towards the upper end of Dirt mode, so there’s some crossover between the two, but Filth moves very naturally from that crunch into a more compressed, gainier (but not overly saturated) version of it.

Verdict

Verdict: ★★★★☆

Guitar World verdict: A practical range of gain, from clean-ish through to raunch, combined with a Tone knob that focuses it to push the right buttons, make The Joker a versatile boost/drive asset for your signal chain.

Hands-on videos

R.J. Ronquillo

Flattley

• “Arguably the most practical single pedal you can put in front of an amp”: Flattley The Outlaw review
• This article first appeared in Guitarist. Subscribe and save.

Guitarist–meets-businessman-meets-pedal-wizard Mike Matthews’ company Electro-Harmonix is, undisputedly, one of the earliest pioneers of guitar pedals – converting the likes of Jimi Hendrix, Carlos Santana, and Jimmy Page – into loyal fans. However, the company has faced its fair share of hardships and pivots to survive – and thrive – in 2026.

The ’70s were a particularly fruitful period for the company. After starting with just $1,000, a scrappy attitude, and a knack for innovation in 1968, EHX was grossing $5 million annually by 1978 and had offices in New York, Toronto, London, and Tokyo.

However, great success and great hardship can go hand in hand.

After a series of business decisions – coupled with an aggressive campaign by a trade union in New York that targeted EHX’s 200-something employees – caused one of the company’s potential lenders to pull its funds, Matthews was forced to file for bankruptcy. Even more heartbreaking, he had to sell the Electro-Harmonix trademark.

“I went bankrupt in ’82. I still tried to hang in there,” he recounts in an interview on The Zak Kuhn Show.

“Finally, the doors were shut. We brought in the generator to just keep the power on. I had loyal people that worked with me. But finally, in ’84, I was completely bankrupt, and it was very devastating, depressing.”

Matthews was forced to do a complete 180. His new plan and target market? The Soviet Union.

“I got involved with vacuum tubes because I was going to the Ministry of Electronics. Everything in Russia was centrally controlled,” he explains.

“In the ’70s, [I] was doing some business with communist countries, like with Hungary, which was communist-controlled. They came to my booth in Frankfurt and wanted to order about $1,000 worth of pedals. They picked out some stuff. I went back to them. I said, ‘Look, instead of ordering this and this and this, order this, because they'll sell better.’ And they said, ‘Okay, we'll take your advice.’”

“So the next year they came back and gave me a $2,000 order, and they said, ‘Mike, you pick out what we should buy.’”

Eventually, Matthews built enough rapport with the Eastern Bloc to secure an invitation to exhibit at the first consumer trade show open to Western countries.

“I jumped on it, and I got carried away. I took a whole band, and I took a guy to set things up… we would go on three times a day.”

This first introduction to the Soviet Union led Matthews down a path that would not only save the company but also secure its future – all under his new brand name, Sovtek.

“I got involved with the vacuum tubes. When we were in Russia, everybody wanted to buy our stuff, but they had no money. So I started thinking, well, ‘What can I buy from Russia, so they'll have money?’”

He continues, “At first, I was thinking of integrated circuits… so I went over to the Ministry of Electronics there… I saw, hanging on the wall, vacuum tubes. That's how I got into vacuum tubes.”

As the Cold War came to an end and the Soviet Union collapsed, another phenomenon was brewing in the guitar world.

“In the ’70s, we built tens of thousands of different pedals… the thing that puzzled me was that pedals that were built in the ’70s were selling for more than what they used to sell for when we had built thousands,” Matthews adds.

“This new vintage market developed, and so initially I started making them [the pedals] in Russia, because Russia collapsed, and they were desperately looking for work to survive.

“I hooked up with a very small military factory in St. Petersburg. They started making these pedals. That's how they came out with the first Electro-Harmonix pedals made in Russia.”

This Russian side quest eventually led to a full EHX comeback – and Matthews even managed to get the trademark back and restart Stateside operations.

The EHX founder's business learnings continue to guide him to this day – right down to his favorite pedal. “[It's] whatever sells, because I mean, it's a business. If I'm not focusing on business, I can't make more money, and if I can't make more money, I can't get more designers to design more products, especially in digital.”

In an exclusive Guitar World interview, Matthews looked back on the brand’s groundbreaking Hall of Science – a veritable candy store for audio pioneers that predated the likes of the Gibson Garage and Fender flagship stores by decades.

JHS Pedals is commemorating what firm founder Josh Scott has called “the biggest mistake of my career” by releasing the Fumble – an $89 boost based on an ultra-rare Dumble circuit.

The affordable standalone unit comes amidst overwhelming fan demand, after the clean boost circuit was mistakenly put in the V1 Notadümblë pedal last year.

As Scott explained at the time, the Notadümblë was meant to include the clean-boosting magic of John Mayer’s one-of-one A Box Later pedal, which was custom-built by the late Howard Dumble and later cloned by Scott.

Then, Scott realized he had made a huge mistake and, in a schematics mix-up, had actually used Mayer’s even-rarer preamp buffer, the Dumble BBC-1, instead.

Consequently, the Notadümblë was discontinued after the first batch – all of which contained the incorrect circuit – sold like hot cakes.

Moving forward, this is the only place the BBC-1 circuit will live, and the small, affordable pedal is as simple as it gets. With dials for its Input and Output, and true-bypass switching, the faithful recreation promises “enhanced clean tones.”

But while the Output is for your Master Volume, the Input isn’t actually a gain knob; it attenuates bass and input gain simultaneously at the front of the circuit. Rolling it off gives a thinner, tighter response. Doing the opposite makes it fuller and louder.

It can be used as a clean boost at the front of pedalboards, or to slam the front of overdrive pedals and dirty amps. Yet this pedal’s story has one more surprise up its sleeve.

While “digging through” the original unit’s history, JHS realized, “The BBC-1 isn’t really a Dumble circuit at all. It’s a JFET preamp lifted almost part-for-part from a Barcus Berry acoustic preamp made in the 1970s – the kind of small utility box that bridged piezo pickups into electric guitar amps in an era when nobody had a modern acoustic preamp.”

Howard Dumble had cloned the circuit and built a few pedals for LA-based players. JHS Pedals adds that “he then used the same JFET stage inside his amplifiers and called it the FET mode.

“Which means the legendary Dumble FET sound is a clone of a 1970s piezo preamp,” the company says.

So, the JHS Fumble is a clone of a clone of a clone, which once accidentally masqueraded as a different clone altogether. Anyone else's head hurting?

Scott has now revealed that the Notadümblë Mark II is on its way – presumably with the right Dumble inside it. But for those that want JHS’s Dumble BBC-1 recreation on its own, the Fumble is not to be, er, fumbled.

“I’m excited to commemorate my own failures,” says Scott.

Get one for just $89 from JHS.

Elsewhere, Scott has raised concerns that ChatGPT is erasing pedal history after an experiment with the AI platform.

The octave pedal (or ‘octaver’) is a mainstay of today’s bass pedalboards. It might not always be on, but many players will use theirs far more than you might expect. If you haven’t used one before, you should definitely give it a try; it might be exactly what your rig has been missing.

In brief, an octaver creates a replica of your instrument’s signal and pitch-shifts it down (or up) an octave, with this pitch-shifted signal heard alongside your original note. The effect is of two separate instruments playing the same note, an octave apart. For bass, the most commonly used setting is an octave below the normal signal – we’re talking about seriously low notes.

You’ll often hear (and feel) them at points when the bass needs to provide extra ‘oomph’ – think of a big chorus or the middle-8 of a pop or rock song. Many other songs and sections have had the sound as more of a feature in its own right.

Once upon a time, the octaver was a purely analogue device, but today’s market is quite diverse – there are probably more digital than analog models now, and these offer a wider range of sounds and capabilities. The major benefits are increased adjustability, and better pitch tracking – how quickly the pedal produces a reliable octave signal. Most current digital octavers will also boast ‘polyphonic’ settings, which means that they are designed to track multiple notes at once.

This is a short-list of some of the best octave pedals for bass in the current market, but it’s certainly not exhaustive – there are lots of great octavers out there, and there are many that could easily have ended up in this guide.

To kick things off, I've gone for the classic Boss OC-5 as my number one pick. It boasts the usual Boss build quality and is a mainstay of many bassist's pedalboards thanks to its top tier performance.

Below, you'll find more standout octave pedals for bass, alongside practical information and a FAQ section which should answer more of your questions.

For the guitarists out there, we have a dedicated best octave pedals guide for six-string players.

Best overall

The original OC-2 is octave pedal royalty, and Boss knows it. The famous brown box was launched in 1982 and is still a reference tone for a huge number of bassists seeking their own perfect octave sound.

The vintage pedal is specifically referred to in the product blurb for the OC-5, whose Vintage mode is intended to give a ‘spot-on recreation’ of those sounds. But there’s also plenty of emphasis given to everything else this modern, high-powered version can do. For the first time, it boasts an octave-up setting as well as down, and the newly-enhanced Poly mode tracks multiple notes at once – with a setting even allowing the octave to be isolated to the lowest note in a chord. A Direct Out jack allows the dry and wet signals to be sent to separate destinations, for blended sounds.

There are several reasons I've selected the OC-5 as the best overall – its feature set and price-to-performance ratio is superb, it sounds great and tracks superbly, and being a Boss compact pedal, it’s housed in a legendarily durable, practical and space-efficient enclosure. In many ways, it’s the obvious choice – but that’s not to say you shouldn’t also consider some of of the alternatives I've picked out below.

Best budget

TC's compact TonePrint form-factor is a bit of an institution in the pedal world at this point, having given us such classics as the Flashback delay and Hall of Fame reverb. The Sub n’ Up stuffs an awful lot of octave goodness into the format, offering (as the name suggests) both octave-down and octave-up sounds, with polyphonic capabilities too.

This is another pedal that’s equally pitched (no pun intended) at guitarists and bassists – but its digital engine is advanced enough that, even in the bass register, tracking is superb. And then, of course, there's the TonePrint feature. If you’ve used other TC pedals in the range, you’ll already know how impressive this is. You can load in external, often artist-developed settings, and the Sub n’ Up can take on amazing, synth-like modulated sounds, or a simple, perfectly dialled-in vintage octave tone, or anything in between. There’s a deep-editing facility for tweaking your own settings, too.

With all this considered, the Sub n’ Up punches well above its relatively small price tag (around $119 or £80). You can, of course, go cheaper still if you want – but why bother, when a pedal of this capability is available for this price.

Best for beginners

This is far from MXR's first octave pedal. Their history with the effect is longer than most – going all the way back to the barely-usable, robotic fart generator that was the Blue Box of the mid-1970s. In fact, the Bass Octave Deluxe is far from the only octave pedal in the company's current line-up, too – but it's the one to go for, especially if you value simplicity and usability without the learning curve that some other octavers can present.

This is an all-analog circuit, excelling at fat, chunky retro sounds, and the controls are easy to get to grips with. The two tone controls are ‘Girth’ and ‘Growl’, for the octave signal’s low-end and midrange respectively – in other words, they do what they say on the tin.

Of course, it offers a dry level control for the all-important signal blend and, finally, there’s a button labelled ‘Mid +’ – no prizes for guessing that this is a midrange boost, letting the MXR slam its way through a dense mix with a serious push at either 400Hz or 800Hz (adjustable internally).

Overall, it’s not over-burdened with complex controls, and it’s intuitive to dial in. It won’t take long to get the Bass Octave Deluxe to sound great.

Best value

Laney’s amps have accumulated generations of fans, but their Black Country Customs effects range is a newer phenomenon. There’s been a steady stream of very interesting circuits, however, and in a solid, compact MXR-sized enclosure with British build – at pretty sensible prices to boot. This, The 85, is the company’s take on the octave pedal, and has clearly had the same level of thoughtful design put into it.

The 85 always provides a sub-octave sound as the foundation of its tone, with its own separate volume control. There’s more, though – a central mini-switch controls the pitch of the second added interval in the signal. Two octaves down, one octave up or, interestingly, a 5th up.

One presumes, then, that the ‘8’ in the pedal’s name is for octave, and the ‘5’ is for that 5th-up setting, which will make for instant power chords on every note you play. It's probably not a setting you'll use all the time (unless you're in a Blink 182 covers band), but it certainly has a lot of potential as a writing tool, and nothing else on this list short of the larger, more expensive Bass Whammy offers the option.

They don’t get quite the same attention as the biggest hitters in the market, but don’t sleep on Laney’s BCC pedals.

Best premium

The Kaamos is the fruit of a collaboration between Darkglass and top-level session bassist Amos Heller – ‘fruit’ being the key word, owing to its punningly-named octave modes. ‘Sublime’, ‘Sublemon’ and ‘Subcitri’ offer three different voices, the latter being a polyphonic setting. Then, as befits a Darkglass product, we find a growling distortion circuit plucked directly from the well-liked Alpha Omicron drive pedal.

The octave can be set in series or parallel with the dry signal. The Kaamos even includes a built-in effects loop which can be shifted to different stages in the pedal’s circuit to allow for optimal positioning of different effects. Serious technical wizardry, then, but it’d be pointless if it didn’t deliver the sonic goods.

This is a Darkglass, though, so of course it does. All three modes have fantastic, defined and characterful sounds on tap, and there’s so much control over the octave signal that it’s practically impossible not to find the sound you’re after.

A serious investment but, in a slightly perverse way, one could look at the Kaamos as a value proposition. Overdrive and octave are two staples of most bass pedalboards, and here we find both in one reasonably-sized box. Add to that Darkglass's unfailingly accomplished quality in design and build, and it's really quite a package.

Most versatile

I was initially reluctant about including the Bass Whammy, as it's not strictly an octave pedal – but that's one of the sounds it does best, whether you want a traditional octave down, an octave up, or foot-controlled pitch-shifting madness. As wild cards go, they don't come much wilder than this.

Unlike other pedals in this guide, it doesn't have any form of blend control, the octave signal being blended in at a set level. For fully-wet effect sounds, though, you can scroll over to the pitch-shifting settings and enjoy the subterranean roar – and the expression pedal means that you can dive-bomb it down for effect, if you want. You can pitch your signal up to two octaves up or down, via useful scale intervals – 2nds, 4ths and 5ths.

It’s an absolute feast of possibilities, and with true bypass it doesn’t have the tone-coloration issues of older Whammy models. It also has a switch for ‘Classic’ or ‘Chords’ processing – the old, glitchy monophonic digital weirdness that became an early Whammy trademark, or a more modern and digitally-advanced polyphonic mode with excellent tracking.

With sturdy all-steel build quality, and a relatively sensible size and price for all its utility, it’s a compelling package.

How to choose an octave pedal?

If you’re in the market for an octave pedal but are new to the sound, think first about what sort of octave tones you like, and what will be the most useful to you. Have a listen to some well-known players or songs that use these effects, and get an idea of what you like and don’t like about the sounds.

From there, think carefully about how much you want to spend. Some players will use their octaver a lot, and some will find only limited uses for it – in the latter case, it’s probably not worth spending a fortune, unless you do have a very specific sound in mind that needs to be just right. At the same time, even if you’re leaning heavily on your octave sound, you may find that a relatively inexpensive pedal will do just fine.

As this round-up shows, you don’t have to break the bank to find an octave pedal that really does everything most players could ever need. Even the cheaper pedals here will be more than good enough for a pro-level board, with high-quality sounds and sturdy construction.

FAQs

How we test gear at Guitar World

Here at Guitar World, we're experts in our field, with many years of playing and product testing between us. We live and breathe everything guitar and bass related, and we draw on this knowledge and experience of using products in live, recording and rehearsal scenarios when selecting the products for our guides.

When choosing what we believe to be the best octave pedals for bass, we combined our hands-on experience, user reviews and testimonies and engaged in lengthy discussions with our editorial colleagues to reach a consensus about the top products in any given category.

First and foremost, we are musicians and music fans, and we want other players to find the right product for them. So we take into careful consideration everything from budget to feature set, ease of use and durability to come up with a list of what we can safely say are the best octave pedals for bass available right now.

Read more about our rating system, how we choose the gear we feature, and exactly how we test each product.

Why you can trust us

Guitar World boasts more than 44 years of expertise and stands as the ultimate authority on all things related to guitars. The magazine and website feature expertly written gear round-ups and top-quality, authoritative reviews penned by a team of highly experienced industry professionals.

Guitar World's inaugural print issue hit the shelves in July 1980, and ever since, it has been captivating players and enthusiasts with engaging lessons, insightful interviews with the biggest guitar heroes, and priceless buying advice for newbie players.

Furthermore, GuitarWorld.com continues this legacy online and serves as the hub of the world's foremost authorities on guitar playing. The site not only hosts content from Guitar World but also showcases articles from respected publications such as Guitarist, Total Guitar, Guitar Techniques, and Bass Player.

With a reach extending to 3.8 million players each month, GuitarWorld.com is a go-to destination for guitar fanatics globally.

Meet the expert

What is it?

Long before the boom in boutique pedals, the one company that could be relied upon for pushing the ‘quirky and weird’ envelope was Electro-Harmonix – and the New York maker is still in motion.

As part of the cute and pedalboard-friendly Pico range, the Atomic Cluster Spectral Decomposer is described by the company as “unlike any effect Electro-Harmonix has made before”.

Specs

• PRICE: $129 | £129 | €119
• ORIGIN: USA
• TYPE: Spectral Decomposer pedal 
• FEATURES: Buffered Bypass, T
  ap tempo
• CONTROLS: Volume, Speed, Blend, Atoms, Sharp/Smooth Mode button, bypass footswitch 
• CONNECTIONS: Standard input, standard output
• POWER: 9V DC adaptor (supplied) 100mA
• DIMENSIONS: 50 (w) x 91 (d) x 47mm (h) 
• CONTACT: Electro-Harmonix

Build quality, usability and sounds

Falling into the broad category of synth and glitch pedals, the Atomic Cluster “breaks down your signal and interpolates it into a variety of musical and whimsical sounds,” says EHX.

This is done mostly via the Atoms knob, which reduces the frequency resolution of your guitar and generates resonant oscillations, the number of which reduces as the knob is turned anti-clockwise. This is best heard in Sharp mode where you get an instant transition of oscillations for a rhythmic effect.

Switching to Smooth mode produces a more diffused effect, with a nice fade between oscillations. The Speed knob sets how quickly the oscillations refresh. Any sound you dial in can be mixed in proportion with your dry sound with a Blend knob up to 100 per cent wet.

With the Atoms knob at maximum, the effect is bright and metallic with a chaotic undercurrent of glitchy burbling, but as you roll it back the brightness reduces and that burbling becomes more coherent, revealing itself in Sharp mode to be more like synth-style arpeggiation with distinct notes.

This is something that, when synchronised (you can use the footswitch tap tempo in place of the Speed knob), can add bubbly flavour behind fast strumming. Switching to Smooth mode, though, results in an effect that can be exploited with guitar dynamics as those distinct notes now fade into each other for a more undulating sound.

Play chords and you’ll get a sustained ambient pad sound, but with single notes the altered envelope of the generated sounds is akin to a backwards effect and it works particularly well if you dig in with a bit of dirt. Balancing Speed and Atoms yields plenty of variations on the theme for subtle blending with dry guitar or upfront prominence.

Verdict

Verdict: ★★★★☆

Guitar World verdict: The Atomic Cluster is niche and not the most predictable of effects. It’s unlikely to appeal to traditionalists, but if you like quirky and off-the-wall, it’s out there waiting to throw a spanner in the works of your guitar tone.

Hands-on videos

Electro-Harmonix

Pedal of the Day

• Best Electro-Harmonix pedals: We break down the very best EHX pedals available in all effects categories
• This article first appeared in Guitarist. Subscribe and save.

Integrated circuit technology advanced at such a rapid pace during the late ’70s and early ’80s that only seven years passed between the introduction of the first analog delay pedals in 1976 and the debut of the world’s first compact digital delay pedal – the Boss DD-2 Digital Delay – in 1983.

The Boss DD-2 was sort of a spin-off product of the larger and more expensive SDE-3000 rack-unit professional digital delay introduced that same year.

But although the DD-2 contained the same 63H101 CMOS gate array IC “long chip” as the SDE-3000, the pedal version was not an SDE-3000 in a stompbox like some have claimed, as the DD-2 lacked the 3000’s modulation section and had a shorter maximum delay time and lower frequency response of 10Hz to 8kHz (compared to the 3000’s 17kHz upper range), amongst several other feature differences.

Regardless of its spec deficits compared to its big brother rack unit, the DD-2 still sounded superb, with its exceptionally impressive low noise performance and longer delay times (12.5 to 800 milliseconds) than those offered by analog delay pedals.

Many guitarists also preferred the warmer sound of the DD-2’s delayed signal over that of the SDE-3000 thanks to the stompbox’s rolled off high frequencies above 8kHz. With only four knobs on its front panel (effect level, feedback, delay time, delay mode), the DD-2 made it easy for guitarists to dial in delay settings.

When the Hold mode was selected, the pedal would infinitely repeat a short section as long as the footswitch was held down, providing a primitive looper function. The DD-2 also included a pair of output jacks for a stereo setup where the stereo (right) jack output the original dry signal while the mono (left) jack automatically switched from a mixed output to the delayed signal only.

When the cost of the 63H101 chip dropped significantly, Boss changed the pedal’s name to DD-3 and reduced the list price, even though the DD-2 and DD-3 were otherwise completely identical. The decision was mainly a PR move to avoid upsetting DD-2 buyers who paid a lot more for the same thing.

Sometime during the very late ’80s the DD-3’s 63H101 chip was replaced by a smaller square IC that also offered improved bandwidth and audio specs. Further chip upgrades appeared in later iterations of the DD-3 up through 2014.

However, many guitarists feel that the darker, warmer qualities of the more “lo-fi” 63H101 chip sound more musical, so long chip versions of the DD-3 (identifiable by a cutout section on the bottom housing for mounting the old-style large power supply jack) now sell for premium prices.

Despite the fact that digital delay technology continues to expand and improve, many discriminating players like Joe Bonamassa, Nels Cline, Billy Duffy, David Gilmour, Eric Johnson, Tom Morello and Brad Paisley still keep their original DD-2 or long chip DD-3 delays on their pedalboards.

While most guitarists have moved on to more modern digital delay boxes (including the Boss DD-8 and upgraded DD-3T), it seems almost everyone who is anyone has used a DD-2 or DD-3 at some point in their careers. It’s a perennial pedal that simply sounds good and works for anything from rambunctious rockabilly slapback and crisp Edge-style dotted eighth note rhythms to trippy long repeating echoes.

• This article first appeared in Guitar World. Subscribe and save.

When Korn and Distortion Inc. teamed up last year to create a pedal that encapsulated Munky’s iconic early sound, it sold out in the blink of an eye. Now, in the wake of that success, his co-riffer, Brian “Head” Welch, is getting in on the action.

Drawing on the nu-metal giant’s 1990s Indigo Ranch sessions with producer Ross Robinson, all 500 of Munky’s $250 Indigo Sludge pedals sold out before Guitar World could even write a news story about it. We don’t expect this new run of limited-edition stories to be any different.

This new dual preamp and fuzz pedal is built for Head’s deliciously nasty tonal standards, and, like its counterpart, features the same breadth of controls to nail every aspect of those seminal early Korn albums.

On its top row are dials for the Master, Gain, Volume, and Distortion, with a three-band EQ and a separate Tone control beneath. Tone-tweaking versatility is complemented by Presence and Octave mini-switches to ensure this thing hits hard, as well as dedicated footswitches for both sides of the pedal.

Once more, the pedal’s preamp section draws on the high-gain preamp stages that were all over the band’s first few records, conspiring to unfurl a “tight, saturated crunch.”

At the same time, the fuzz marries sustain with hairy chaos, ideal for seven-string brutality, with Korn among the earliest advocates of extended-range guitars.

A nice, nuanced touch is that while both pedals sport the same self-titled record-inspired artwork, Head’s version of the Indigo Sludge pulls away from the red visage of Munky's, opting for a color scheme closer to the original album cover.

“This pedal isn’t ‘inspired by’ – it’s built on the same ingredients that forged the sound,” says Head.

Distortion Inc has also teamed up with PRVNZ to provide easy, secure digital authentication for all Korn pedals.

Head’s Indigo Sludge pedal is available to pre-order via Korn.

Elsewhere, Korn bassist Ra Díaz has used the power of community to recover 15 stolen basses. In contrast, original bassist, Fieldy, has finally lifted the lid on the reasons for his exit from the band.

Two historic guitar pedal brands, DOD and Morley, have united for the Wah-ocTo-Fuzz, an expression pedal with plenty of tricks up its sleeve.

The three-in-one stompbox, which builds off the classic Morley wah chassis, is like a supergroup of pedals. Covering the low end is DOD’s revered ‘80’s FX35 Octoplus sub-octave circuit, with Morley’s famed wah and fuzz circuits also getting in on the action.

The result, its makers say, “is a pedal that simply leaves players saying, ‘WTF!’” It’s a little shoehorned in, but we see what they’ve done there.

Designed for guitar, bass, and keyboards, the three effects can be run independently or in various combinations, giving them three reasons to find their way onto people’s pedalboards.

Expect the “captivating, glitchy essence of the 1980s” from the Octoplus side of the pedal. Dial in the dry signal input via the Direct Level control, and use the Tone Control to adjust its brightness, and the Octave Level to determine just how thunderous you need it to be.

Over to Morley’s double act, and the wah features the firm’s classic Electro-Optical design and switchless operation, with the effect in operation as soon as its glow-in-the-dark treadle is stomped on. Metallica’s Cliff Burton most famously used the Morley wah, and it has stood the test of time since its introduction in the 1970s.

For all things fuzzy, the collaborative pedal serves up Morley’s ‘70s era, velcro-like tonality, complete with a Level dial for the gain and a Fuzz Level dial for managing the wider signal.

The WTF is housed in a lightweight cold-rolled steel chassis, which should make it pretty bulletproof. A “premium Morley buffer circuit” that protects the pedal’s tone from “mischief” in the signal chain is also included, so it can better partner with a litany of other effects.

Beyond that, it’s business as usual: it has 1/4” in/output jacks and draws 9V of power via a plug or a battery, with the latter getting a quick clip battery door. It also comes with a one-year warranty.

The three-headed DOD and Morley Wah-ocTo-Fuzz is available now for $249.

See DigiTech for more.

What is it?

The basic premise for the ZEQD-Pre pedal is to introduce some valve mojo into a signal chain and add character.

The result of this collaboration between EarthQuaker Devices and Dr Z Amplification has been designed around an EF86 pentode valve coupled with three-band EQ for fine-tuning of the sound.

There are several scenarios for use, reflected in the available outputs, which can all be used simultaneously. There’s a jack for a standard signal chain, maybe directly in front of an amp or a modeller, an XLR direct output (with switchable cabinet emulation) that could be used to feed a mixing desk or audio interface, and a headphone output with cabinet emulation.

Complementing the standard bypass footswitch, a second footswitch bypasses the three-band EQ and delivers a full-range boost with level set by the Boost knob.

Specs

• PRICE: $399 | £399 | €499
• ORIGIN: USA
• TYPE: Valve-powered preamp pedal
• FEATURES: True bypass
• CONTROLS: Boost, Level, Bass (20Hz to 400Hz), Middle (400Hz to 2kHz), Treble (2kHz to 20kHz), Ground Lift, XLR Cab Bypass, Boost footswitch, Bypass footswitch
• CONNECTIONS: Standard input, standard output, XLR direct output, standard headphone output
• POWER: 9V DC adaptor (not supplied) 500mA
• DIMENSIONS: 96 (w) x 148 (d) x 66mm (h) 
• CONTACT: EarthQuaker Devices

Build quality, usability and sounds

The EF86 isn’t a valve that offers its own drive as such, but in its context here delivers a big open sound with clarity and great dynamic response, all tied in to the really classy EQ, which never gets out of shape.

Everything above about nine o’clock on the Level knob offers a boost for additional gain stage to push an amp’s front-end, with an extra kick up via the Boost footswitch as required.

Without an amp, the pedal could sit at the end of a pedalboard employing the XLR output direct to front-of-house or FRFR speaker cab as your main amplifier, if you have the pedals to get the sound you need. Likewise, it could be a useful tone conditioner with added dimension before or after a digital modeller.

With pedals, the ZEQD-Pre is also perfect for practice, as the headphone signal with speaker simulation gives you a comfortable sound that encourages you to play.

It’s also excellent as a DI box for recording clean guitar – we got great results with a Strat plugged straight in and the XLR output (speaker sim engaged) connected to an audio interface with compression added as a plugin on the DAW recording track.

Verdict

Verdict: ★★★★½

The best part of $400 may seem a bit steep for something that could be categorised as a widget, but the ZEQD-Pre is a very practical professional piece of kit with numerous uses for the guitarist.

Guitar World verdict: As a tone-sculptor and gain provider that is capable of sitting in a variety of signal chains, it is both an enabler and an enhancer.

Hands-on videos

EarthQuaker Devices

Reverb

Sweetwater