Hand-picked reviews and demos of the pedals we love — with full credit and links back to the original reviewers. Scroll on, and check back daily for a fresh one. New posts appear at the top.
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🆕 Featured New Release
NEW King Tone Soloist Mini — SRV Glass From the Duellist, Shrunk to a Micro Board
King Tone has squeezed Side A of its legendary Duellist — the glassy, SRV-flavored Soloist overdrive — into a mini enclosure with the circuit left untouched. Drive, Volume, Tone and Body controls sweep from amp-like cleans to fat, sustaining leads, while an internal trimmer swaps between Stock, Glass and Edge voicings to dial the classic mid-hump in or out. It runs the same high-quality 4558 op-amps and sought-after voice as the full-size original, now small enough for a travel rig or fly board at $199.
👀 Just Announced — Previews
MXR EVH Modern High Gain
A high-gain distortion co-designed with Eddie Van Halen himself, finally seeing release after debuting at NAMM 2026. Shop MXR →
Way Huge Swollen Pickle XXX Jumbo Fuzz
The cult Swollen Pickle fuzz supersized into Way Huge's jumbo enclosure, announced alongside Dunlop's NAMM 2026 drop. Shop Way Huge →
JHS Coyote
A new JHS fuzz paying tribute to a 'lost' cult-classic circuit and its maker. Shop JHS →
🎸 The Reviews
NEW Boss PX-1 Plugout FX — 16 Classic Boss Pedals in One Expandable Stompbox
Boss has squeezed nearly five decades of compact-pedal history into a single shapeshifting box. The PX-1 ships with 16 faithfully modeled classics — from the DS-1 Distortion and SD-1 Super Overdrive to the CE-2 Chorus, DD-2 Digital Delay and the famously elusive SG-1 Slow Gear — each running on a dedicated DSP engine so it looks, sounds and responds like the original, complete with the familiar Boss knob layout and a small display for deeper settings. A Swap function flips between two effects on the fly, and stereo I/O, tap tempo and MIDI clock are all on board, while the effect library keeps growing through the Boss Effect Loader app. Guitar World’s review sums it up as an effects-pedal jukebox packed with classics and overlooked gems — how well it fits your rig mostly comes down to how much you’re willing to spend beyond the $249 asking price.
NEW Electro-Harmonix Pico Atomic Cluster — A Glitch-Synth Spectral Decomposer, Pocket-Sized
EHX calls this the strangest effect it has ever built, and Guitar World’s four-star review happily agrees it is out to throw a spanner in your tone. The Atomic Cluster reduces your guitar’s frequency resolution into a swarm of resonant oscillations: the ATOMS knob sets how many ring out at once — roll it back for glitchy arpeggios, ambient synth pads and backwards-style swells — while SPEED (with tap tempo) controls how fast they refresh, from rhythmic bubbling to pure chaos. Sharp and Smooth modes plus a full wet/dry Blend make it a genuine sound-mangler rather than a one-trick box. It is Pico-sized and carries a $129 street price.
Read the full review at Guitar World →🎸 Shop Electro-Harmonix →
NEW IK Multimedia TONEX Board — The Whole TONEX Universe, Now With a Touchscreen
IK Multimedia just dropped the TONEX Board, its first touchscreen floor modeler, and Guitar World calls it the company’s most ambitious unit yet. It packs the full TONEX ecosystem into one pedal: a 5″ touchscreen, four footswitches with Preset/Scene/Stomp modes, 2,000 built-in Premium Tone Models (with the new V2 captures), 76 AmpliTube and TONEX effects, and enough routing for dual-amp, stereo and wet/dry rigs, plus MIDI, dual stereo outs and an effects loop. The headline is the price — at $999 it undercuts the Quad Cortex mini, Tone Master Pro and Helix Stadium, which is why GW says it’s “biting at the heels” of the big-name modelers. Shipping now.
NEW JHS x Coppersound Short Circuit — A $119 Boost-A-Drive-A-Fuzz You Solder Yourself
JHS has teamed up with DIY specialists Coppersound for the Short Circuit, a $119 build-it-yourself “Boost-A-Drive-A-Fuzz” that grows the classic two-transistor LPB-1 circuit into a three-mode dirt box with Volume, Gain and a RAT-style Filter control. Unlike the snap-together Notaklön and Notadümblë, this one is a real soldering project: you populate the PCB with resistors, caps, diodes, transistors and pots yourself, then box it in a rugged 125B enclosure with a Coppersound faceplate. Guitar World notes it’s also a personal milestone for Josh Scott — it was the project on his bench right before the 2025 mountain-bike crash that sidelined him. Available now direct from Coppersound.
NEW Catalinbread EG1 Lo-Fi Delay — Radio, Cassette and Broken-TV Echoes on Tap
Catalinbread’s second pedal on its tap-tempo platform is a lo-fi delay built around the idea of signal “transmission” rather than a single tape imitation. A three-way toggle picks Vintage Radio (band-pass filtering and broadcast grit), Cassette Tape (wow, flutter and saturation) or Digital Television (Nyquist error and downsampling), with a Mod knob whose job changes per mode and a Transmission knob that sets how much of that degradation hits the repeats. Underneath is a proper delay: roughly 900 ms of time, feedback that will self-oscillate, a mix control that goes fully wet, and a multi-color tap footswitch. Delicious Audio calls it eccentric yet thoroughly playable, and Catalinbread has it at $239.99 (on sale for $203.99 at launch).
NEW JHS AT Mini — Andy Timmons’ 100-Watt Drive, Shrunk to $129
JHS has squeezed the original AT V1 circuit — the Angry-Charlie-derived “@” drive Andy Timmons has leaned on since 2016 — into a mini enclosure. Gearnews notes the trade-offs are small: the footswitchable boost and the wattage toggle are gone, with the pedal locked into Timmons’ preferred 100-watt voicing, the loudest and least-compressed of the bunch. You still get Volume, Drive, EQ (a high-pass filter that tames or thickens the top end) and Air (a presence-style brightness control), covering everything from punchy British crunch to saturated lead distortion. At $129 versus $219 for the full-size AT, it’s a cheap way onto a crowded board.
NEW Walrus Audio Canvas Expression — Two Jacks, 16 MIDI Messages, Nothing to Wear Out
Walrus follows January's Canvas Volume with a matching expression pedal, and the headline detail is what is not inside it: in place of the strings, gears and potentiometers that eventually kill most expression pedals, the treadle rides on a contactless magnetic position sensor, which gearnews reports delivers a very smooth tracking response alongside adjustable tapers for setting the feel underfoot. Jacks A and B are fully independent and can each be assigned to expression, switch or CV duty across TRS, TS and RTS wiring, while 1/8-inch TRS MIDI and USB-C turn the pedal into a controller capable of up to 16 assignable MIDI messages — all configured in a browser-based editor that covers tapers, wiring, CC and PC assignments, CV settings and switch behaviour, with four LEDs under the treadle showing which parameter you are editing. gearnews's read is that it is overkill if you only ever need to sweep one knob on one pedal, but close to ideal for touring players and synth users pushing a lot of control data around a rig. It is built from steel and aluminum, runs from a standard 9V center-negative supply at 300mA, and is available now at $299.99.
NEWDOD Drag Analog Delay — A Bucket-Brigade Echo With a Tape-Stop Trick
The Drag is the spiritual successor to DOD’s cult-classic Rubberneck, squeezing that pedal’s time-stretching wizardry — plus a few new tricks — into a single-footswitch enclosure. Guitar World’s Alex Lynham gave the sounds a full five stars: an all-analog 750ms bucket-brigade voice that is dark and rich enough to set up like a Space Echo and walk away, with Rubbernecking, SlideStop and Evade friction modes on tap for octave-up and octave-down pitch bends, screeching tape stops and genuinely unpredictable glitches when you push the BBD chips past their limits. The catch is the control layout — cramming Rubberneck-level functionality onto one footswitch means you will be reaching for the manual, and probably for a DigiTech FS3X external switch, to get at everything. His verdict: an unusual pedal that is trying to do something new, and one where trial and error pays off. Street price is $219.99.
Electro-Harmonix Effects Interface — Your Pedalboard, Now a DAW Plugin
From the company that gave us the Big Muff comes a Big Muff-sized box that finally makes hardware and software play nicely together. The Effects Interface works three ways: as a standalone 2-in/2-out USB-C audio interface, as a way to insert your real pedals into a DAW track exactly like a plugin, or — flipped around — as a footswitchable way to drop computer plugins into your live signal chain. Guitar World’s Alex Lynham scored it five stars across build, usability and sound, praising the chunky sliders and stereo input metering and noting that running drum busses through a Big Muff, a Tube Screamer or a pair of real-time Whammys effectively hands you a whole new rack of gain and modulation plugins. His caveats: pushing DAW plugins back out onto your board takes more setup fiddling, and at $359 it costs about what a decent audio interface does. His verdict was still that it is a pedal he did not know he needed.
Read the full review at Guitar World →🎸 Shop Electro-Harmonix →
NEW Crazy Tube Circuits Triptychon — Boost, Fuzz and Drive in One Five-Star Box
Stacking a boost into a fuzz into an overdrive is how a lot of great rock tones actually get built, and the Athens-built Triptychon puts all three of those blocks in one compact enclosure — a four-voice fuzz section, a switchable Rangemaster-style treble boost or analog octave-up, and an amp-like drive with its own tone control. Guitar World's Alex Lynham gave it a five-star review, calling it superbly built and noting that the drive stage actually makes the fuzz more controllable rather than less, much like a pushed tube amp would. He reckons it is at its best with all three circuits running and the Fuzz and Drive past noon, where the lead tones are, in his words, simply brilliant. His only real gripes: it is not cheap at $359, and there is no Big Muff voicing in the fuzz block — but he found there was hardly a bad setting on the pedal.
NEW MXR Mr. TalkBox Signature — 25 Watts of Talk Box, Built With Byron Chambers
Byron “Mr. TalkBox” Chambers has spent 27 years putting talk box vocals on gospel, funk, R&B and pop records, and when he wanted a rig-friendly box built specifically around that silky electro-groove sound he took the idea to MXR. Per Premier Guitar's announcement, the result leans hard on headroom: a 25-watt amp and a lightweight neodymium driver deliver a thick, full low end without the usual talk box heft, while Volume, Tone and Gain controls plus a gain-bypass switch let you shape vowels and keep hot signals in check instead of just wrestling them. It runs on 18V and ships with an 8-foot tube and a mic stand clip, so it works equally well on a pedalboard or a desk for radio and podcast work. It is available now at $449.99 street.
Source Audio Encounter — Six Delays, Six Reverbs, One Deep-Space Vessel
MusicRadar frames the Encounter as an evolutionary rebuild of Source Audio’s 2019 Collider rather than a simple reissue: six delay engines (Noise Tape, Resonant, Drum Echo, Echoverb, Kaleidoscope and Helix) sit alongside six reverbs (Hypersphere, Shimmers, TremVerb, Reverse, Lo-Fi and Swell), several of them all-new algorithms aimed squarely at ambient players. Each half gets its own multi-function footswitch — the delay side doubling as tap tempo with a subdivisions switch — and the whole pedal runs in full stereo with a 100% analog signal path, eight onboard presets, 128 more over MIDI, and selectable true, soft or buffered bypass. Deeper editing happens over USB in Source Audio’s Neuro app, where patches can be shared with and pulled from the wider user community. At $399 it is not a casual buy, and MusicRadar’s read is that this one is built for pedalboard cosmonauts chasing genuinely immersive soundscapes rather than everyday slapback.
NEW Death By Audio x Rainger FX Amp Crash — A Real Amp and Speaker, Sealed Inside a Pedal
When Rainger FX’s David Rainger pitched Oliver Ackermann on the idea of putting a microphone inside a pedal, Death By Audio escalated it and dropped a real 3-watt amplifier and a 2-inch speaker into the chassis alongside it. Nothing here is modeled: an actual amp pushes an actual speaker while an internal mic captures the air moving around inside the box, and you blend that mic’d signal against the direct one to land anywhere from warm, touch-sensitive overdrive to crushing fuzz, natural feedback and genuinely unpredictable harmonic blooms. A built-in effects engine with reverb, echo and chorus warps those physical tones further, and an external 8-ohm speaker output turns the pedal into a tiny standalone amp for driving a full cab. Delicious Audio calls it a masterclass in weird, wild engineering that only two kindred boutique builders could pull off — rugged buffered bypass, lifetime warranty, and equally at home as a practice rig, a direct recording tool or a living instrument that reacts to how you play.
Read the full review at Delicious Audio →🎸 Shop Death By Audio →
NEW Walrus Audio Lüm Texture Engine — The Sold-Out Granular Experiment, Back for Good
Walrus originally built just 600 Lüms as a limited-run experiment, sold every one of them, and then discontinued it — and MusicRadar reports that enough players kept asking that the pedal is now back permanently, in matte black and guava gloss. It is essentially the Slö, Lore and Fable collapsed into one box: Grain Cloud scatters your signal into glitchy fragments, Grain Verb soaks those grains in reverb, and Forward/Reverse Verb runs a conventional and a backwards algorithm head-on into each other. Three onboard presets, adjustable ramp time, selectable trails and a Stretch Engine that shifts the sample rate from 0.5x to 2x round it out. MusicRadar’s read is that “texture” is quietly becoming its own pedal category alongside delay and modulation — and at $279, the Lüm is the obvious way in.
NEW Crazy Tube Circuits White Whale Junior — A Real Spring Tank That Fits on Your Board
Digital spring emulations have gotten very good, but they still are not springs — and the White Whale Junior refuses to compromise. Crazy Tube Circuits has fitted the same three-spring tank used in its full-size White Whale models, driven by a dedicated analog power amplifier, into an enclosure measuring just 154 x 83 x 68mm, which may make it the smallest pedal on the market to pair a genuine spring tank with authentic amp-style tremolo. The two sections run fully independently, each with its own footswitch and its own volume control: the reverb side gets Dwell, Wet Mix and Tone, the tremolo side gets Speed and Intensity, and the reverb sits ahead of the tremolo in the chain, exactly as it would inside a vintage combo. Designed and built in Athens, Greece, it runs from a standard 9V center-negative supply at 110mA and lands at $359 — a lot of drippy, surf-soaked real estate reclaimed from your pedalboard.
NEW JAM Pedals Tiny Amp Destroyer — A $29 Pawnshop Amp, Bottled and Set on Fire
Stu Mackenzie of King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard has tracked every Gizzard record through a $29 pawnshop practice amp, and this JAM Pedals collaboration bottles what happens when you shove two Boomster boosters into it until it stops behaving. It is a three-footswitch gain machine — two stackable drive stages plus a standalone treble booster built on JAM’s Rooster circuit — with active Bass and Treble, a Notch control for dialing in boxiness, and a Magic switch that piles on small-amp compression. Guitar World reports a $399 price, artwork by longtime band artist Jason Galea, and the first 50 units hand-signed by Mackenzie and Galea. As JAM puts it, this is not an amp in a box so much as the sound of the box losing the fight.
NEW Old Blood Noise Endeavors Beam Splitter V2 — One Guitar, Three Amps, No Overdubs
OBNE's Beam Splitter takes one mono guitar signal and fans it out into three parallel analog drive voices — hard clipping, soft-and-hard clipping, and a transistor drive that now pushes into fuzz — then routes two of them through independent delay lines of up to 211ms, so a single part arrives sounding triple-tracked. Delicious Audio reports that V2 keeps the lush chorusing, slapback and width of the original while rebuilding the architecture around full digital control: three footswitches, three onboard presets expandable to 127 over MIDI, expression assignment for any knob, a lower noise floor, and a new Spread control for stereo imaging. Outputs can stay in parallel mono, spread to stereo, or split three ways into OBNE's “trereo” format for wet-dry-wet rigs. It's $379, built in Oklahoma, and offered in Shadow, Cool and Warm.
NEW Keeley Tube Drive Twin Triode 12AT7WA — A 1950s Sylvania Tube, Numbered in Gold
Keeley's new Tube Drive is a two-in-one gain box built around a genuine 1950s Sylvania 12AT7WA, with both triodes running in series in Class A at high voltage and feeding a vintage tweed-style tone stack — real tube breakup rather than an emulation of it. The second footswitch belongs to the Super Phat Mod, one of Keeley's most-loved overdrives, and a simple foot gesture flips the effect order so you can push the tube into the Phat Mod or run it the other way around. Every tube is hand-selected, burned in and tested behind a matte black shroud, and the pedal adds a Remote jack for external per-side switching plus selectable true-bypass or Keeley's silent buffered switching. Keeley lists this RKFX.com-exclusive 12AT7WA edition at $499 — a numbered run of 100 in brushed gold, designed and assembled in Oklahoma City — and that first batch sold out on August 7, with wider 12AT7WC and standard 12AX7 editions reported to follow on September 1.
Read the full details at Keeley Electronics →🎸 Shop Keeley →
NEW EarthQuaker Devices ZEQD-Pre — A Real EF86 Tube Amp for Your Pedalboard
Co-designed with Mike Zaite of Dr. Z Amplification, the ZEQD-Pre is a genuinely all-analog preamp built around an EF86 pentode — the same hi-fi, touch-sensitive tube behind the pristine clean tones of several Dr. Z amps. It pairs a passive three-band EQ with a separate footswitchable boost (engaging the boost bypasses the tone stack), and adds a balanced XLR direct out with switchable analog cab simulation plus a headphone output for silent practice; every output stays live at once, even in bypass. Premier Guitar’s Charles Saufley found the EQ section made a 50-watt Bassman sound full and lively at bedroom volume, and running the pedal straight into an interface stripped away the “uncanny valley” lifelessness of direct and modeled tones — he described it less as a compromise than as an amp with its own appealing voice, somewhere between a Princeton and an AC15. It earned 4.5 out of 5 and a Premier Gear award at $399 street; his only real gripe is that you can’t run the boost and the EQ together.
Read the full review at Premier Guitar →🎸 Shop EarthQuaker Devices →
NEW MXR Flanger/Doubler — Dimebag’s Rack Secret, Now a Stompbox
MXR has squeezed its legendary rack-mount Flanger/Doubler into a pedalboard-sized enclosure, keeping the all-analog bucket-brigade circuitry and the original control set intact. A Doubler button flips between sweeping jet-engine flange and the thick, slightly offset second layer that Dimebag Darrell ran as an always-on thickener on tracks like “Cowboys from Hell.” Guitar World notes it also adds an Invert switch for wet-signal polarity, CV in and out for synths and sequencers, a Line Level switch for hot signals, and two LEDs that track delay time visually. Street price is $333, and Zakk Wylde’s guitar tech confirmed he had already used one in recent Pantera Celebration rigs.
NEW MXR Textures Granular Synth Engine — Your Guitar, Broken Into Grains
Textures traces its lineage back to the delay pedal, but instead of handing your playing back to you intact it chops the signal into tiny grains and rebuilds them into something else — shimmering pads, glitched-out rhythms, and lush reverberations that drift back through themselves. Three modes (Delay, Auto-Freeze and Layers) plus dials for Time, Size, Overlap, Pitch, Regen and Mix let you reverse the grains, freeze them into drones, shift their pitch or turn them loose with randomisation, and you can stack reverb, filter and vibrato on top and run the whole thing mono, wet/dry or true stereo. MusicRadar’s Jonathan Horsley pitches it squarely at the adventurous player — ambient soundscapes, film scoring, or high-gain noise-rock chaos — and calls it the kind of pedal that does things you never thought to ask for. Eight factory presets keep it approachable despite the 37-minute official demo, and it’s out now at $269.
Fender Shields Blender — My Bloody Valentine’s Octave Fuzz, Fully Weaponized
Kevin Shields spent four years helping Fender rebuild the overlooked ’70s Blender into something far stranger. The original octave-up fuzz is still the heart of it, but it now shares the box with a footswitchable sub-octave fuzz that has its own volume, a wide-ranging tone control, and a boostable “expand” section — so you can run the fuzz clean, with either octave, or with both piled on top of each other. The wild card is the sag circuit, which starves the transistors of voltage and reacts hard to how you attack the strings; Premier Guitar’s Charles Saufley called it tricky to wrangle but wonderfully dynamic under fingerpicking, and scored the pedal 4.4 for its huge tonal range and high-quality build. His only real complaint: it takes up a lot of pedalboard real estate.
NEW Mr. Black Stereo Vintage Ensemble Professional — A CE-1 That Fills the Whole Room
Mr. Black has rebuilt its 2015 Vintage Ensemble as a true-stereo pedal, keeping the late-'70s Roland CE-1 voice and adding a spatial-expansion algorithm that spreads the modulation into a three-dimensional field instead of a flat left-right sweep. Per Premier Guitar, the Pro pairs that vintage character with genuinely modern control: tap tempo, an expression-pedal input, nine presets and full MIDI support. It's hand-built one at a time in Portland, Oregon, runs on a standard 9VDC supply, and carries a $299.95 street price.
NEW Hotone NC-200 Verbera — Studio Convolution Reverb, Stompbox Money
The Verbera is an odd bird for a compact pedal: it runs two reverb engines in stereo at once, one built on 120 convolution impulse responses captured in real rooms, halls and plates, the other on Hotone’s own XR algorithms, with tails stretching to 20 seconds. Under the hood there’s 32-bit conversion and an analog dry-thru path, and the connectivity list reads like rack gear — MIDI, USB, an effects loop, expression and dual-footswitch control, plus the ability to load your own .wav impulse responses through Hotone’s app. MusicRadar’s review landed squarely on the value angle, calling it a stunningly good reverb that sounds and operates like a pedal costing twice the money. If you have been eyeing the boutique ambient boxes but not the boutique price tags, this is the one to audition first.
NEW Origin Effects EQ Deluxe — A 1950s Pultec Tube EQ, Shrunk to Pedal Size
Origin Effects has built its name on squeezing studio outboard into stompboxes, and its newest target is the Pultec EQP-1A — the 1950s valve equalizer whose gently flattering curves have been quietly shaping records for seventy years. The EQ Deluxe is the first time that circuit has been adapted for a pedalboard: independent Low Boost and Low Cut controls with switchable corner frequencies, a semi-parametric midrange with its own Bandwidth knob, a High Cut band, and Level and Gain controls that drive a push-pull output stage into fine harmonic saturation rather than outright distortion. The important detail is that the frequency points weren't copied wholesale from the studio unit — they were re-tuned specifically for guitar and bass — while a high-headroom, buffered-bypass design makes it as comfortable feeding an audio interface as it is sitting on a board. gearnews calls it a pedal for connoisseurs: hand-built in England from premium components, with a price to match at €419 (roughly $449 in the U.S.), and available now.
NEW Warm Audio x Dirty Boy Junior Series — $349 Boutique Circuits, Rebuilt for $169
Dirty Boy's handbuilt stompboxes have turned up on boards belonging to Neal Schon, Phil X, John Frusciante and Tom DeLonge — and they've also cost $349 apiece. The new Junior Series, built in partnership with Warm Audio and announced July 21, 2026, shrinks three of those circuits into compact $169 boxes. The Jr Booster derives from the Ball Buster, serving up 10dB of analog boost alongside Bass and Treble controls and a three-way H-M-L frequency switch; the Jr Fuzz adapts the Afro Fuzz down to Fuzz, Level and a six-way Freq switch, which MusicRadar describes as behaving like a good vintage Fuzz Face that cleans up nicely; and the Jr Overdrive carries the Preamp circuit with Dirty Boy's Tube Amp Emulation tech and a 4x12-voiced speaker-emulated output for going direct to an interface or desk. Brand owner Danny Gomez told MusicRadar he chose Warm Audio because these circuits have a history and personality he wasn't willing to compromise, and every unit is still individually hand-tested. All three are available now, and Dirty Boy continues building the hand-made originals.
NEW Beetronics Pollinator Hazee Delay — Beetronics Goes Digital, and It Gets Weird
The Hazee Delay kicks off Beetronics' new Pollinator series and is the boutique builder's first fully digital pedal — but nobody should expect a straight-ahead repeat box. Modulation sits ahead of the delay line rather than after it, so the wobble is baked into every repeat instead of being sprinkled on top. Eight modes split evenly between tremolo and filter, each paired with a different repeat type: forward, octave-up, reverse, and octave-up reverse. Just four knobs — Time, Feedback, Mix and Mod — but Guitar World's Trevor Curwen found them highly interactive, with small moves producing big swings, from rotary-ish auto-wah shimmer at fast Mod rates to pulsing, layered ambient wash. He scored it four stars, praising the rugged build and unusual palette while noting it's a niche, mono-only device. $249.
NEW Fender Santa Ana V2 Overdrive — The JFET Amp-in-a-Box, Rebuilt for Real Pedalboards
Fender's 2026 V2 refresh takes Stan Cotey's original Santa Ana and rehouses it in a slimmer aluminum enclosure with top-mounted jacks, so it finally plays nice on a crowded board. Under the hood it's still a JFET Class A overdrive running on an internal 18V charge pump — that's where the tube-like headroom and sag come from — and the active 3-band EQ now gets a placement switch, so you can run it pre-drive to shove chosen frequencies into clipping or post-drive to sculpt the finished tone. Voice and Tight switches clean up muddy low end, and the new Multiswitch footswitch flips between latching and momentary operation for quick stabs of dirt. Gearnews notes it lands around $172, alongside V2 versions of The Pelt, Pugilist and The Bends.
NEW Greer Amps Mori Drive — A Boutique Tube Screamer With Klon Manners
Greer Amps has re-tuned the familiar JRC4558-based Tube Screamer topology into something noticeably more open: smoother response, considerably more output on tap, and a mid hump nudged into a more musical part of the spectrum, with a dose of Klon-style clarity layered over the top. The name is the Japanese word for forest, spelled out in white kanji across the green enclosure and chosen for the pedal's woody, organic midrange. MusicRadar picked it out in its July 2026 gear round-up as a TS-meets-Klon hybrid with ample volume and a handsome enclosure, noting that the excitement around it sold out the first small-batch run, though Greer is building more. It is priced at $249, and City Music Annex is a Greer dealer.
NEW DOD x Morley Wah-ocTo-Fuzz — Three Vintage Circuits, One “WTF” Treadle
Two stompbox institutions finally agreed to share a chassis. Morley supplies its switchless electro-optical wah — step on the glow-in-the-dark treadle and it engages, step off and it bypasses — plus a fuzz voiced after one of its own 1970s circuits, while the octave section is lifted from DOD’s 1980s FX35 Octoplus. All three can run solo or stacked, with separate Intensity and Fuzz Level knobs for the dirt and Octave Level, Tone and Direct Level for the sub-octave blend. Premier Guitar notes the cold-rolled steel chassis and onboard Morley buffer keep it gig-worthy on a crowded board, and it runs on a standard 9V supply or a battery. Street price is $249.99 — a lot of vintage weirdness for one footprint.
NEW JHS 3 Series Bit Crusher — $99 Digital Destruction in Three Knobs
JHS built its $99 3 Series around three knobs and no menus, and the newest addition aims all that simplicity at wrecking your signal on purpose. The Crush knob drops bit depth from a pristine 24-bit down toward 1-bit — grainy and textured at first, then square-wave aggression and gated digital distortion — while Sample Rate works the opposite way, sliding from a clean 32.768kHz into aliasing, harmonic artifacts and full digital collapse. A Filter knob and a two-position Type toggle shape the wreckage, offering either a vintage Oberheim-flavored low-pass (JHS suggests it for bass) or a swept high-pass/low-pass pairing that MusicRadar likens to the tiny speaker in a handheld game console. It arrived alongside two equally odd siblings — a Glitch Delay inspired by the Line 6 DL-4 and Bill Frisell, and a Ring Modulator nodding to the Way Huge Ringworm and Danelectro Green Ringer — all available now at $99 each.
NEW Electro-Harmonix Deluxe Big Muff Pi 2 — The Most Tweakable Muff Yet
EHX is billing this as the closing chapter in its long-lost dual op-amp Big Muff saga, and it may be the most adjustable Muff the company has ever built. The familiar Volume, Tone and Sustain controls are still front and center, but they're now joined by a three-way Wicker switch that opens up the high end, a footswitchable parametric mids section with Freq and Level knobs plus a Hi/Lo Q resonance switch, and a single-knob noise gate for taming hiss at high sustain settings. Plug an expression pedal or CV source into the EXP jack and you can sweep the mid frequency in real time for fuzz-wah territory, while holding the bypass footswitch gives you momentary bursts instead of latching. Premier Guitar lists it as available now at a U.S. street price of $188.20.
Read the full review at Premier Guitar →🎸 Shop Electro-Harmonix →
NEW MXR Textures — A Granular Synth Sandbox in a Stompbox
MXR has taken the granular synthesis usually reserved for modular rigs and boiled it down to a pedalboard box. Textures samples what you play, slices it into tiny grains, and hands you Size, Overlap, Pitch, Reverse, Delay, Regen and Mix knobs to stretch, reverse and scatter them into shimmering pads, glitched-out stutters and reverb trails that fold back through themselves. Three modes change how the grains get captured — Delay chops continuously as you play, Auto-Freeze listens and sustains what it hears, and Layers samples up to four separate notes or chords into their own buffers for stacked polyphonic pads. Premier Guitar reports it ships with eight ready-to-go presets, onboard reverb, filter and vibrato, full stereo I/O, plus expression pedal and Split + Tap support, at $269.99 street.
NEW Catalinbread Jimothy — A Limited-Run Bit Crusher for the Beautifully Broken
Catalinbread's newest limited edition is a sample rate reducer built to wreck your guitar signal on purpose: a Degrade control sets how coarsely the pedal samples what you play, sweeping from faint digital grit to fully aliased destruction, while a wet/dry Mix knob folds that damage back against your clean tone. The circuit grows out of the bitcrusher in the company's Knight School kit, and it arrives wrapped in Noble Hardesty artwork of the Pacific Northwest's favorite blurry cryptid wandering an error-strewn landscape. Guitar World flagged it in its July 24 round-up as a gnarly new bitcrusher, admitting the name alone nearly won it the week's top spot. The first orange run has already sold out; a grey raw version is up for pre-order at $119.99, shipping late August.
NEW Vemuram Las Lunas — A Boutique “Dream Distortion” Years in the Making
Vemuram’s Las Lunas is the Tokyo boutique builder’s long-in-development take on classic ’70s and ’80s distortion, and it splits the difference with two independent voices — one a flat, detailed drive, the other an edgier, sharper and fuller-bodied gain — each with enough onboard control to dial the tone in precisely. Guitar World’s Matt Owen named it his “dream distortion pedal” of the week, praising Vemuram’s irresistible boutique pedigree while conceding that at around $415 it’s a splurge that’s hard to justify. If you want handbuilt, no-compromise vintage-flavored gain and budget is no object, this is aspirational drive at its finest.
NEW DOD Drag — A Time-Warping Analog Delay You Play With Your Feet
DOD’s new Drag is a bucket-brigade analog delay built to be played rather than set-and-forgotten — up to 750ms of warm BBD echo (a cavernous 1.5 seconds in Rubberneck mode), with a patent-pending Friction system that lets you bend and stretch the delay time straight from the footswitch for dramatic pitch dives, soaring rises and glitchy, elastic time-shifts. Momentary footswitch tricks like SlideStop signal-freeze and HopStop stutter, plus a four-waveform Drift modulation section (sine, reverse saw, square and random), turn it into an ambient and shoegaze noise machine, while top-mounted jacks and a reversible StagePlate keep it pedalboard-friendly. GuitarBomb scored it 9.2/10, calling it a triumphant return to form for expressive analog design — the only real gripe being that tap tempo needs the optional FS3X footswitch.
NEW DOD Badder Monkey — The Cult “Bad Monkey” Reborn as a Triple Overdrive
The original DigiTech Bad Monkey languished in bargain bins for years until a viral Josh Scott shootout video sent used prices through the roof—so DOD rebuilt it from the ground up and made it badder. The Badder Monkey stuffs three independent overdrive circuits (Behaved, Bad, and Badder) into one box, which you blend two at a time with a patent-pending 360-degree Barrel knob, stack all three at once in Troop mode, and reshape with a phase-invert switch for even more combinations. Bananas (gain), Curiosity (output) and the Grunt/Screech Mood EQ round it out, yet it still nails the green-voiced, Tube Screamer-style tone the original was loved for. Premier Guitar calls it a viral overdrive that has evolved well beyond a simple reissue—all for a $149 street price.
NEW EarthQuaker Devices Towers — A Stereo Reverberant Filter That Builds Cathedrals
EarthQuaker calls Towers an entirely new kind of reverb: your signal is routed through a network of resonant filtered feedback loops and multi-tap delay reflections, conjuring everything from gentle ambient washes to cavernous, stereo-wide soundscapes. A resonant low-pass filter interacts with those reflections so you can sculpt shifting harmonic textures inside the reverb tail, while eight assignable presets recall your favorite settings instantly. The showpiece is the “Stretch” footswitch, which slows everything down—doubling reverb lengths and warping filter frequencies for gloriously unhinged results. Premier Guitar found it the kind of pedal that sounds “incomprehensibly huge and haunting” maxed out, yet still capable of restrained, subtle textures.
Read the full review at Premier Guitar →🎸 Shop EarthQuaker Devices →
NEW Wampler Golden Jubilee — Two Hot-Rodded ’80s Amps in One Box
Designed by Brian Wampler, the Golden Jubilee squeezes the punch, feel and harmonic richness of hot-rodded ’80s high-gain amps into a pedalboard-ready box built around two complementary voices — a tight, articulate American boutique high-gain (the DS channel) and an aggressive, saturated British crunch (the OD channel). Each channel gets its own level, gain and tone controls plus voicing and stacking toggles, so you can jump from defined rhythm tones to singing leads and run the two independently or stacked together, all without menus or tap-dancing. Per Premier Guitar, it’s engineered as a complete gain platform that holds its amp-like response across clean tube amps, solid-state, and digital rigs, and like every Wampler it’s built in the U.S.A. Street price is around $239.97.
NEW Electro-Harmonix Deluxe Big Muff Pi 2 — The “Lost” Op-Amp Muff, Deluxed
EHX takes the “lost” Dual Op-Amp Big Muff 2 circuit and gives it the full Deluxe treatment, landing on a noticeably more aggressive Muff with far more tone-shaping on tap. Alongside the classic Volume, Sustain and Tone trio you get a Blend knob to dial your clean signal back in for clarity, plus an onboard noise gate controlled by a single knob. A three-way Wicker switch opens up the high end, while a footswitchable mids section lets you set the level and center frequency of the midrange and choose a Hi or Lo Q — and you can even sweep those mids with an expression pedal. Per Guitar World, it’s the “final boss” of the Big Muff Pi 2 line.
Read the full review at Guitar World →🎨 Shop Electro-Harmonix →
NEW Catalinbread Crooner — An RCA Studio Mic Pre, Squeezed Into a Stompbox
Catalinbread follows last year’s Airstrip with another studio-console-in-a-box, this time modeled on the RCA BA-31 — a vintage mic preamp that engineers have been politely abusing for decades. Four knobs do the work: Push drives the front-end amp from a clean, tone-preserving boost into rich compressed distortion, while Trim pushes the germanium-and-output-transformer preamp section past its comfort zone for anything from warm overdrive to thick fuzz. Volume and Filter handle output and high-end roll-off, so it stays easy to dial in. Max both gain controls and gearnews reports a compressed lead tone with genuine vintage sag; it runs internally at 18V from a standard 9V supply (no battery), at $179.99.
NEW Gamechanger Audio PLUS Pedal II — Infinite Sustain, Now on Autopilot
The Latvian outfit behind the Plasma has rebuilt its piano-style sustainer from the ground up. A new Spectral Sampling engine resynthesizes whatever you feed it — guitar, vocals, sax, cello — while holding onto the original timbre and harmonics, and the new Auto Layer Catch mode listens for fresh notes and folds them into the sustain pool on its own, so you can rest a foot on the brass treadle and just play. A Layers knob spans one to ten simultaneous voices (or Infinite, which endlessly folds old layers into new), and a three-position effects loop drops outboard gear before the engine, inside the sustained layers only, or across the whole output. Sound On Sound notes the combo XLR input and onboard mic preamp mean almost any source plugs straight in. It’s €399 and available now.
Read the full review at Sound On Sound →🎸 Shop Gamechanger Audio →
NEW MXR Wylde Audio Zakk Sabbath Overdrive — Zakk’s Signature Drive, Now in Sabbath Purple
MXR has teamed up with Zakk Wylde once again for a limited-edition run of his Wylde Audio Overdrive, this time wrapped in a striking purple finish inspired by his Black Sabbath tribute band, Zakk Sabbath. Under the new artwork sits the same proven circuit — a simple Output, Tone and Gain layout voiced for Wylde’s loud, aggressive gain while keeping the articulation and punch a lead player needs. As Gear Gods notes, it’s built to boost an already-dirty amp into screaming, sustain-rich lead tones, making it equally at home on muscular hard-rock rhythms and searing solos. Priced around $170, it’s the cosmetic twin of the original silver version — just, in Gear Gods’ words, cooler-looking.
NEW Meris Ottobit X — A Lo-Fi Time Machine for the VHS Generation
Meris calls its new $599 flagship a 'modular degradation and texture engine,' and MusicRadar reckons it's a serious piece of equipment for making gloriously un-serious sounds — cutting-edge stereo DSP aimed squarely at '80s nostalgia. The damage toolkit is huge: sample rate sweepable from 48Hz to 48kHz, bit depth crushable from 24 bits down to 1, three filters, four preamp colors (including Tube, Vinyl and Wavefold), VHS-flavored delay and reverb, five pitch and five modulation effects, and six glitch modes highlighted by 'Wikki Wikki' — a real-time vinyl-scratching looper. It's gig-ready too, with 99 presets across 33 banks, full stereo and MIDI, a color display and 18 artist presets out of the box. Meris founder Terry Burton says designing it 'took me back to the days of riding my BMX to pick out a VHS' — and that's exactly the energy it delivers.
NEW Chase Bliss Big Time — '80s Rack Delay Magic on Motorized Faders
Chase Bliss teamed up with John Snyder of Electronic Audio Experiments for its most ambitious Automatone yet: a stereo hybrid echo that wraps an all-analog preamp and feedback limiter around a 32-bit digital delay engine chasing the gloriously lo-fi character of early-'80s rack units like the PCM 70 and SDD-3000. gearnews.com calls it a 'true delay universe' — six motorized faders, four modes spanning chorus, slapback, glitch clusters and a looper with up to 3.2 minutes of memory, plus balanced stereo I/O and full MIDI with 127 presets. At $999 it's the company's priciest pedal to date, shipping now direct from Chase Bliss.
NEW Strymon TimeLine MX — The New King of Delay Workstations?
Fifteen years after the original TimeLine became a pedalboard institution, Strymon has unveiled its successor — and Guitar World reckons it might be the most advanced delay pedal on the planet. The TimeLine MX packs 12 delay engines, and for the first time two of them can run at once in series, parallel, or split routing, with new Oil Can and Drum Echo vintage voices plus a glitchy granular Spectral mode joining the classics. A tri-core ARM processor, updated OLED display, five-minute stereo looper, and full stereo and MIDI I/O round out a dizzying spec sheet. At $679 it costs more than many multi-effects units, but for serious delay devotees it could be the last echo box they ever buy.
NEW EarthQuaker Devices Bellows Fuzz Driver — The Cult Two-Knob Fuzz, Back From the Dead
Seven years after it was discontinued, EarthQuaker Devices has brought back its two-knob Bellows Fuzz Driver as a Legacy Reissue limited to 1,000 units worldwide at $129. First unveiled at NAMM 2016, the transistor-based circuit straddles blown-out tweed-amp grit and full-on saturated fuzz, with a Drive control that works like the volume knob on a non-master-volume amp and cleans up beautifully from your guitar. As Premier Guitar notes, the pedal earned a posthumous cult following — especially among bassists — because the circuit preserves the input's entire frequency range with none of the low-end scoop typical of fuzz, making it equally at home on bass, synth, organ or anything else you run through it.
NEW Walrus Audio Lüm Texture Engine — The Sold-Out Granular Reverb, Back for Good
Walrus Audio's ambient cult hit is officially back: originally a September 2025 limited run of just 600 units that vanished amid the hype, the Lüm rejoined the permanent lineup on July 7, 2026 in two new finishes — Matte Black and Guava Gloss — at $279.99. It fuses the DNA of three fan favorites (Slö, Lore and Fable), fracturing your signal into tiny grains wrapped in washes of reverb across three modes: Grain Cloud's glitchy feedback-delay granules, Grain Verb's dense, reverb-soaked textures, and a playful Forward/Reverse Verb lifted from the Lore. The rare party trick, per Gearnews, is the Moment footswitch, which automates any of the five knobs between two saved settings with 10ms to 5-second glide times, while a Stretch engine warps the global sample rate from half to double speed. Three onboard presets and selectable trails round out a soundscaper built for players who blur the line between instrument and ambient sound design.
NEW Strymon Fairfax — A Miniature Class A Amp in a Box
Launched alongside the Canoga fuzz (below) in Strymon's new all-analog Series A line, the $199 Fairfax is the brand's first analog drive — and it isn't really a distortion pedal at all, but a complete miniature amplifier: a 100% analog Class A output stage inspired by the obscure Garnet Herzog tube unit Randy Bachman used to cut 'American Woman.' Three knobs — Drive, Level and a signature Sag control that dials in spongy, brown-out amp feel — plus a Bright toggle sweep it from creamy, touch-sensitive boost to thick, saturated grind, and like a good valve amp it responds to your pick attack and guitar volume. Guitar World's verdict: a triumph that will inject your rig with impressively usable and versatile drive tones.
NEW Electro-Harmonix Pico Shimmer — Cosmic Reverb, Pocket-Sized
Launched in June 2026 at $149, the Pico Shimmer squeezes EHX's 'cosmic reverb' into the brand's tiny Pico format, growing out of the seed planted by its acclaimed Oceans reverbs. A Scene button cycles three distinct voices: Intergalactic, a sci-fi spin on classic shimmer built from polyphonic octaves, reverb, modulated delay, compression and even a string-synthesis engine; Off-World, a mellower, vintage-synth-flavored shimmer with extra delay modulation; and Etherdust, which randomizes the delay time applied to the reverb tails for anything from granular sparkles to distinct glitch echoes. Four dual-duty knobs (Blend, Time, Voice and Depth, with secondary Reverb Mix, Delay, Depth and Rate functions) pack deep control into the mini enclosure, and pressing and holding the footswitch summons an Infinite Reverb freeze to play over. Digital, analog and hybrid buffered bypass modes plus an included power adapter round it out, per MusicRadar.
NEW Mooer META FX — One Pedal, Three Personalities
Launched in June 2026 at £149, the META FX is Mooer's shape-shifting take on the compact multi-FX: instead of cramming every effect into one box, you flash the pedal over USB-C with one of three dedicated firmware families — Reverb, Delay, or Modulation — each unlocking 40+ fully stereo algorithms on Mooer's new X Algorithm Platform. A 1.28-inch circular color touchscreen wrapped in an RGB halo ring plus dedicated hardware knobs keep editing menu-dive-free, while 100 presets, tap tempo, dual TRS stereo I/O and a headphone out with its own gain stage make it equally at home on stage, desk or pedalboard. Guitar Bomb rates it 7.8/10, praising stereo algorithms that punch well above their weight class — the catch being you can't run reverb, delay and modulation simultaneously, and swapping families requires a computer. All firmware swaps and future algorithm expansions are free via the Mooer Studio app.
NEW Catalinbread CB Paint — '90s Rack Reverb Nostalgia in a Stompbox
Launched in April 2026 at $209, the CB Paint reimagines the cult Alesis Microverb — the '90s half-rack unit beloved by Neil Young, Daft Punk and Trey Anastasio, and the sound smeared all over Interpol's Turn On The Bright Lights — as an eight-mode 'Late 1900s Reverberator' stompbox. Six room algorithms scale from studio-apartment tight to warehouse huge via a retro chickenhead dial, joined by the era-defining Gated mode and an oddball 'rushing' Reverse that mimics the original's math trick rather than literally flipping the signal. Modern conveniences the rack never had round it out: a wet/dry Mix knob, a Tone low-pass filter, and an Onset control adding up to 200ms of pre-delay — doubling as gate time in Gated mode and smear amount in Reverse. Per MusicRadar, it may be the most convenient way to get those darker, boxy digital-verb sounds today.
NEW Darkglass Anagram Guitar Essentials — The Bass Modeler King Goes Guitar
Announced June 30, 2026, this is Darkglass's first-ever guitar-focused modeler — a limited-edition Anagram curated with Sweetwater and Andertons. The Guitar Essentials pack loads 12 amp models spanning Fender Deluxe and Twin, Marshall, Hiwatt, Matchless and Magnatone flavors, plus three drives inspired by the Klon Centaur, Bluesbreaker and Tube Screamer — all running on a six-core DSP that handles up to 24 simultaneous effect blocks behind a 7-inch touchscreen. The headline feature, per Guitar World, is full Neural Amp Modeler (NAM) compatibility, something no direct rival like the Quad Cortex, Helix Stadium or TONEX currently offers. The catch: it's a one-time limited run, priced at $1,299.
NEW JHS Fumble — Dumble's BBC-1 Boost, Born From a $200k Mistake
Released in June 2026 at just $89, the Fumble is JHS's production version of the ultra-rare Dumble BBC-1 — the JFET clean-boost preamp Alexander Dumble built for his most valued clients, including the unit cloned for John Mayer. It owes its existence to a famous blunder: JHS accidentally loaded this circuit into the first run of its Notadümblë pedal, and demand for the 'wrong' sound proved strong enough to earn it a standalone release. The control setup is simple but clever — Output is your master volume, while Input simultaneously trims bass and input gain at the front of the circuit — and MusicRadar reckons it's a hard-working little box: an always-on tone sweetener, a way to push an amp or your dirt pedals harder, or an end-of-chain lift. True bypass, two knobs, boutique JFET tone at an entry-level price.
NEW Eventide H9 Harmonizer Gen 2 — 74 Algorithms in a Compact Box
Unveiled in June 2026 and shipping June 24, the H9 Harmonizer Gen 2 is a giant leap for Eventide's famously pedalboard-friendly multi-FX. It packs the complete algorithm suite from the H9 Max and flagship H90 — 74 algorithms in all — powered by a new full-ARM processor for faster, easier operation, plus more than 1,000 user presets to store them. You get studio-quality delays and reverbs (vintage tape echo, modulated, digital, multi-tap, reverse, spring, hall, plate and stranger fare), classic Harmonizer sounds like the H3000-evoking Crystals, and modern Granular and polyphonic algorithms rendered with Eventide's SIFT pitch-tracking. A redesigned enclosure adds a larger 2.5' display with all the knobs and buttons on top, and there's USB-C, MIDI, aux-switch and expression I/O, with Bluetooth promised in a future update. Priced at $599, per MusicRadar.
NEW Keeley RK2000 Funk Siren Delay — Trey Anastasio's DM2000, Now a Pedal
Shipping since April 2026, the RK2000 is the first-ever pedal recreation of the famously over-engineered 1983 Ibanez DM2000 rack delay — the unit Trey Anastasio uses to conjure his signature 'Funk Siren' ambient loops. Keeley built it at the request of Trey's guitar tech, who needed a dependable replacement for unreliable 40-year-old hardware, and preserved the original's defining Hold and Mod section, whose modulation is so dramatic it has been likened to slamming your hand against a tape deck's supply reel. Modern touches round it out: presets for instant recall, full MIDI, expression control over any parameter, remote Hold/Mod switching and pitch-shifted ping-pong delays. Designed and built in Oklahoma, with a $369 street price.
NEW Walrus Audio Highpoint — Studio-Grade Analog Optical Compression
Unveiled in April 2026, the Highpoint is Walrus Audio's high-end take on studio-style compression, built around an old-school analog optical circuit and topped with a console-style VU meter you can configure to monitor input, output or gain reduction. A sidechain high-pass filter rolls off everything below 160Hz before it reaches the compressor, so low notes keep their punch and dynamics instead of clamping down the whole signal — a real boon for bass players. MusicRadar calls it a serious, all-singing, all-dancing compressor: dial in the settings that suit your rig and you may never touch it again. Available now at $349.
NEW EarthQuaker Devices Sunn O))) HalfLife — The Life Pedal, Shrunk
Announced in June 2026, the HalfLife shrinks EQD's acclaimed Sunn O))) Life Pedal into a board-friendly box that's about half the size but, in the makers' words, just as heavy. Three circuits live in one chassis: a blendable analog octave-up fuzz voiced after vintage Shin-Ei FY-2 and FY-6 units, a brutal 'rodent'-style distortion with three clipping modes (op-amp, asymmetric and symmetric), and a clean boost. Built with modern parts rather than the rare NOS components of the originals, it joins EQD's permanent lineup at $259. A doom, drone and noise tone machine that finally fits a crowded pedalboard.
Line 6 HX Stomp — The Helix, Shrunk to Pedalboard Size
The HX Stomp crams 300+ amps, cabs and effects from Line 6's flagship Helix into a tiny stereo box. Reviewers call it a staggering amount of pro-grade tone in a pedalboard-friendly format, with capacitive footswitches that make editing nearly error-free. The trade-off is the small screen and a block limit, so it's less fluid to tweak on the fly than the bigger Helix units — but for grab-and-go versatility it's hard to beat.
Xotic EP Booster — The Set-and-Forget Tone Enhancer
This tiny stomp recreates the preamp of the Echoplex EP-3 — the secret weapon of Page, EVH and Eric Johnson. One knob delivers up to +20dB of boost, with internal DIP switches for unity gain and a glassier top end. Reviewers describe it less as a volume box and more as a tone enhancer: stomp it on and things just sound better, with more top-end shimmer and a tighter low end. A classic many players leave on all the time.
Catalinbread Belle Epoch Deluxe — Echoplex Magic in a Stompbox
A faithful, feature-rich recreation of the beloved Maestro Echoplex EP-3 tape delay. Premier Guitar praises its rich, colorful tape-echo and analog-style sounds, imaginative modulation and sweepable resonant-filter functions, and useful expression-pedal control — from glinting sunlit slapback to misty, moody, psychedelic textures. High-quality construction rounds out a tape-echo that's as inspiring as it is practical.
Read the full review at Premier Guitar →🎸 Shop Catalinbread →
Source Audio Collider — Stereo Delay + Reverb, Streamlined
The Collider distills the best of Source Audio's Ventris reverb and Nemesis delay into one smartly streamlined box — seven reverbs and five delays, including a gorgeous Tel-Ray-style oil-can delay. Premier Guitar highlights how its wide-ranging controls stretch common effects to uncommon extremes, especially when combined, while keeping a fluid, creative workflow that feels like an instrument rather than a menu.
Read the full review at Premier Guitar →🎸 Shop Source Audio →
EarthQuaker Devices Plumes — The Screamer, Reinvented
A low-noise, low-to-medium gain 'small signal shredder' that reinvents the classic Tube Screamer. A 3-way clipping switch offers symmetrical LED clipping, op-amp boost (no clipping), or asymmetrical diode clipping, and the extended controls deliver loads of headroom and clarity. Premier Guitar calls it a standout in a crowded field — plenty of unique tones at a remarkably friendly price.
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Keeley Halo (Andy Timmons Dual Echo)
Andy Timmons' long-secret dual-delay tone in a pedal: two independent delays, up to 1,500ms, five rhythm modes (including the signature Halo mode), eight presets, tap tempo and expression control. The repeats bloom gently and sit tastefully in the background, making it a superb match even in front of high-gain tones — one of the most expressive delays of recent years.
Walrus Audio Julia V2
A benchmark analog chorus/vibrato. Its analog LFO toggles sine/triangle waves, the unique Lag control adds swing to each sweep, and the fully analog D-C-V blend sweeps from dry to classic 50/50 chorus to full wet vibrato. The verdict: a gorgeous, lush chorus and outstanding vibrato packed with analog warmth.
JHS Notaklön
A flat-packed, build-it-yourself Klon-style overdrive for $99 — JHS sold 12,000 in a week. Beyond classic Klon tone, a Shamrock mod switch adds roughly +4dB gain and harder-edged clipping. Reviewers call it one of the most affordable Klon clones out there, and easily the most entertaining.
EarthQuaker Devices Afterneath V3
One of the most creative reverbs ever made — stretched, deeply resonant, EQ-shifted washes with a Drag control that makes it feel as much like a synth module as a stompbox. It rewards players who want far-reaching extremes other reverbs can't reach.
Read the full review at Premier Guitar →🎸 Shop EarthQuaker Devices →
Boss RV-6 Reverb
Eight pristine, highly musical reverbs — Modulate, Spring, Plate, Hall, Room, Dynamic, Shimmer and a +Delay mode — all from three simple knobs. New algorithms and overhauled DSP make it a flexible, road-ready workhorse that's become a modern standard.
Electro-Harmonix Pico POG
The smallest POG ever: EHX's legendary Polyphonic Octave Generator shrunk into a tiny enclosure with transformative octave-up/down sounds, lots of control and impressively tight tracking — ideal for crowded pedalboards.
Read the full review at Guitar World →🎸 Shop Electro-Harmonix →
Eventide H90 Harmonizer
Decades of Eventide studio heritage in a flagship multi-FX: 60+ effects, more DSP, upgraded algorithms and flexible routing, intuitive even before the companion app. A high-ticket pedal that can pull you out of a creative rut in a flash.
Wampler Tumnus Deluxe
The popular Klon-style Tumnus with the flexibility players asked for: Bass/Mids/Treble EQ, a Normal/Hot switch for extra gain, and a buffered/true-bypass switch. Transparent as a boost, organic in its warm crunch — a versatile, musical overdrive that accentuates your amp.
Darkglass Microtubes B7K Ultra
A modern bass-tone benchmark: aggressive Microtubes overdrive plus a deep, switchable 4-band EQ and a road-ready chassis. Most issues that plague other distortions — low-end loss, separated sound — are answered here with a switch or control.
MXR Duke of Tone
An Analog Man collaboration that brings King of Tone mojo to a $150 pedal you can actually buy. Same thru-hole parts and boutique WIMA caps as the King, delivering a warm-yet-clear, open sound — rated a standout value by Guitar World and MusicRadar.