What do I like best about designing guitar pedals? Well, there’s a few stages to it, the first and most exciting (to begin with) is cultivating the idea. This stage is interesting because it begins with a blank sheet of paper and we just write ideas down, what we want it to do, how we want it to sound, what will be its unique selling point, who is the pedal for? Is it a long-term release or a limited run thing? Once all these questions are answered we begin to build the circuit concept, often it is done in a Duplo/Lego fashion with key building blocks such as power rails, noise filtering, inpu ..read more

Why does the Warthog exist? Following on from the article as to why the Peacekeeper exists, I thought I would move onto the Warthog, especially as it stacks so very well with the Peacekeeper. The Warthog was designed at around the same time as the Gunshot pedal. My thinking was that the Gunshot would offer the British amp tonality and the Warthog would offer a more USA based tonality (think Santana, saturated boogie style). During its development it became very clear that the circuit had much more to offer than one fixed tone. So much so that we were going to name it after a chameleon to descr ..read more

WHY HEAVY WATER? The Heavy Water was the answer to a chorus of voices asking for me to make the boost in the Dane available as a separate pedal. So, we did this, but I wanted to provide a more versatile pedal and as such 2 boosts were put into the same box. It might seem ludicrous, but I’ll explain why in a moment. The Boost in the Heavy water is designed to provide an absolutely incredible level of boost but it does it in such a way to be more useful to you the guitarist. The headroom the pedal offers means that whatever you run into the Heavy Water gets louder without adding its own distorti ..read more

You have a new pedal, what do you do with it?  There is a rude answer, an obvious answer, and a more thought-out answer. I’ll try and provide the latter. Whenever I get a new pedal, I first spend a little time reacquainting myself with my current “go to” sound. This gives me an auditory benchmark and reminds me of the background noise of my rig, the interaction between my guitar and gives me a chance to realise if something is amiss with my tone.  I then put my pedalboard to one side and don’t touch it save for unplugging the two guitar leads I know to work. These are plugged into th ..read more

The FALLOUT CLOUD is inspired by the famous 4 transistor silicon fuzz circuits from the 70s. I have long held a fascination for these circuits, the feel, touch responsiveness and violin like sustain are addictive as is the fact that all variants seem to have their own character. The Muff style fuzz very much became a “pokemon” situation for me, “gotta catch them all” that is until I tried a particularly incredible triangle big muff I had in for repair. Initially it was rubbish (as it was broken), but once fixed it let out this astonishing wall of sound that just blew me away. The issue I found ..read more

  Notwithstanding the current world situation, it’s clear that there are less and less music venues to play in. however those that remain still have the standard level of awkwardness with regards load in. Because of this, lifting a full stack plus pedalboard and carrying it into a venue can often be beyond soul and back destroying, but not as bad as the load out when all you really want to do is chill. So, is there a solution in hand that can remove this burden and yet still provide room filling sound? The biggest amount of mass for your rig resides is really is down to your amplifier and ..read more

How do I build pedalboards? I’ve spent the last few weeks building some pedalboards in my spare time, one for a customer of ours, and being in “the zone” aka being a glutton for punishment I decided to build two more pedalboards for my work “studio”. Although all pedalboards followed differing design briefs, I built them following my tried and tested methodology. This isn’t magic, it’s much more mundane than that, its focussed primarily on planning and then implementing the plan. Step 1- Preparation Whatever you do, if you are planning to implement more than one pedal, start from scratch. This ..read more

Why do you need an EQ Pedal? An EQ pedal is simply put a pedal that allows you to craft the frequency range of your sound by cutting or boosting specific frequencies as determined by the pedal designer. They can be very simple i.e. focusing on one frequency category (say Mids only) or they can be more versatile and operate over 3 frequency bands Bass, Mids and Treble. If you need more control, some EQ pedals offer 10 or 12 bands of fixed frequency shaping. Some even go one step further and offer parametric equalisation where you have full control over the frequencies chosen, th ..read more