Hello, and welcome to Guitar World’s weekly gear round-up, your one-stop-shop for keeping up to date with what’s been happening in the big wide world of guitar gear over the past seven days.
From new electric guitars to amp modeler updates, the guitar industry is never short of fresh releases, and it can sometimes be hard to stay in the loop with every new launch.
To make things a little easier, we’ve put together an essential must-read guide that will cover the major releases, the boutique drops, and everything in between.
Blackstar BEAM Mini
Jaws were hitting the floor when Blackstar was showing off this BEAM Mini at NAMM 2026, and it’s not just the state-of-the-art features such as the AI stem separation tech that allows you to isolate and/or remove any instrument from a song and then play along to it, or that this is the first amp with native support for open-source Neural Amp Modeler (NAM) tech. It’s the quality of the sounds, from the “component-level modeling” and the hardware.
With a pair of full-range drivers and a pair of passive bass radiators, the BEAM Mini sounds huge in Blackstar’s Super Wide Stereo.
We’ll have to wait until August for the AI stem separation – a feature that puts it in competition with the likes of the JBL BandBox – but just think of the possibilities of being able to access the 200,000 NAM amp sounds of the Tone3000 online community. It’s a serious statement of intent from the British guitar amp brand.
IK Multimedia TONEX One+
We all love the TONEX One. It’s an entire rig in a mini pedal, and it sounds incredible. But IK Multimedia has taken a second pass and unveiled the TONEX One+, giving the compact modeler newfound capabilities, such as full MIDI integration (via TRS and USB-C connections) and wireless mobile editing.
This means you can leave the laptop behind and perform edits and manage presets on your phone. You can automate your settings, integrate the TONEX One+ within a MIDI pedalboard, taking what was an already compelling option for the gigging musician and making it… Well, making it more pro.
As ever, it ships with 20 onboard presets, with sounds all digitally engineered using IK Multimedia’s AI Machine Modeling tech, and there’s top class effects onboard, and it connects to the wider TONEX eco-system where you can avail yourself of some 60,000-odd sounds from the ToneNET online community.
Hotone Freqlux
What is this weird science? I try to be open minded about digital effects, new technologies, toppings on pizza and what have you, but encountering a pitch-shifter pedal such as this is a little like taking a walk in the woods and encountering a talking cat. The eyes are seeing, the ears are seeing, the brain is yelling ‘WTF!?’
This pitch-shifter pedal from Hotone is really all kinds of different, “a creative engine built for players who hear more than one idea at a time,” and it presents us with three different pitch voices, and you can blend them, stack them, change the modes on them and conjure truly byzantine harmonies that you can play with just your guitar.
Each of the three pitch engines can be edited independently. So choose from five modes (Poly, Key, Detune, Mod, Arp), then play around with them, arranging them across the stereo field, add movement to them, make them deep, bright, whatever. It has full stereo, an LCD display, processes audio at 32-bits, you can hook up an expression pedal or MIDI and – thank God – there are presets, 200 of them.
Bamboozling, yes, but also incredible, right? And at least I’ve got something to talk to that weird cat about…
Fender Godzilla distortion pedal
We might never get the opportunity to take one of those Godzilla Stratocasters home with us, not least the $36,000 Custom Shop one with the “ROAR!” button, but at $149, maybe this op-amp distortion with its muscular 2-band EQ (15dB in either direction!) will scratch that itch for plasma-breathed electric guitar tone.
It has the same Hammertone enclosure with wraparound Godzilla graphic, and just like the original kaiju it has an internal trimmer for adjusting its midrange… Wait, that’s not true, surely, but then Godzilla’s roar has changed over the years. It’s amazing what EQ can do. Expect this one to sound fiery but surprisingly versatile, like Godzilla playing a romantic lead in a Nancy Myers movie.
JHS 3 Series Ring Modulator, Bit Crusher and Glitch Delay
Having fully stocked the world’s budget-conscious pedalboards with the $99 essentials from its 3 Series range of stompboxes, JHS Pedals is expanding the affordable and accessible range to more outré sounds.
These are for the player all bugged-out on overdrive, chorus and fuzz, like, “A fuzz pedal? What, are you square, man!? Are you a cop?” Okay, try the Bit Crusher, which crushes the bit depth of your guitar tone, reduces its sample rate and applies a filter, and as JHS Pedals demonstrates, it can produce some gnarly square-wave fuzzstortion in the right hands.
Then there’s the Glitch Delay, which can be used as a garden variety delay pedal until you dial in the probability of randomized glitches on the repeats. JHS Pedals says it took some inspiration from Bill Frisell and our old friend Mr Line 6 DL4. It’s “a living, breathing delay that moves with you without losing your tempo”.
Finally, there is the 3 Series Ring Modulator, which offers a dual-mode take on an effect that’s really old but still totally radical, with one of those modes striking us as a neat alternative to an octave pedal that would pair nicely with some fuzz (if that doesn’t sound too square to you).
EVH Gear Wolfgang Special Baked Maple
It has been a good week for those seeking a high-performance shred machine with a relatively sensible price tag and a top-class build, as EVH Gear updates the Wolfgang Special with the Baked Maple edition.
A Wolfgang Special Baked Maple might sound like a delicious breakfast pastry but has the roasted maple neck (as per Eddie Van Halen’s shape and specs), the flagship Alnico II humbuckers and the choice of a Floyd Rose 1000 Series vibrato or a TOM fixed tailpiece with fine-tuners for those extra anal about intonation.
These are priced from from $1,399 and the finishes are sweet. That TOM in Oxblood with gold hardware? I’ll take one to go and a black coffee.
Lerxst Analog Kid chorus pedal
Having stocked our record collections with life-affirming, mind-expanding progressive rock, Rush’s Alex Lifeson has spent recent years trying to give us the means to recreate those sounds with our own two hands.
Or in this case, feet, because the latest from his gear brand, Lerxst, is the Analog Kid, a chorus pedal that will give you the same modulated lushness Lifeson administered on classic Rush albums such as Permanent Waves, Signals and Moving Pictures.
It has a pair of LFO circuits, each with its own footswitch, switchable vibrato modes, mono and stereo operation, and – entre nous – it sounds incredible.
Kiesel Dino Cazares Signature Model
This is the week that Kiesel and Dino Cazares broke cover with an all-new signature guitar. It’s called Dino, and if its body is a radically augmented Kyber Headless, its neck an Ultra Thin Velocity profile that “rivals the thinnest necks in the industry”, then the soul of this new machine is the Fear Factory riff coder’s signature Seymour Duncan Retribution humbucker. It’s active, brutal, a T-1000 in a black plastic housing.
You can pick up the Kiesel Dino as a 7-string guitar and have at it. Or you can get it as an 8-string guitar. Either way you’ve got a multi-scale bruiser on your hands.
Empress Effects Drive
Usually, $299 would be a deal-breaker for an overdrive pedal. In fact, it probably should be. But then the Empress Effects Drive appeared in the inbox, and there it was, it had the clipping meter on the front like one of those ’80s Geiger counters you saw in the movies, and all those knobs, that EQing capability, and of course, it isn’t just an overdrive.
It’s more like an amp, if the amp was designed around the sole purpose of shaping and engineering a drive tone, from the barely there crackle to saturation.
We’re talking pre-gain mids shaping, a boost that can be routed pre- or post-gain, post-mix EQ and – arguably – best of all, a clean blend control, which might not be The Most Sexy Feature of All Time® but can be the secret to nailing your tone, and the kind of thing that makes you think $299 for a drive pedal is okay.
Spurr Audio OSCIX VSM Chorus
The opening chords on the demo video for this “Waveform Chorus Engine” had us all reaching for the Dramamine, but let’s not hold that against it. Spurr Audio has created a chorus that makes other choruses seem dry by comparison.
There are what? Eight different waveforms here, and when you dial them in there’s a display so you can see how you are manipulating them in real time. Choose the Sine waveform for all your vintage chorusing needs, or the Sine 3rd if you had a couple of Spicy Margs at lunch and are feeling dangerous.
Then there is the Lumps mode (“organic, irregular textures”), Random waveforms, and great sweeping envelope transitions, and yes, no, do not operate the OSCIX VSM under the influence – not least because the name is hard enough to say out loud when sober. Bizarre, brilliant, conventional when you need it to be, this could be a minor hit in 2026.
