Digital Clef

  It seems that every year, around the end of July, I end up making a ridiculous purchase. This year is no exception. It all started by trying out a used bass cab at Long & McQuade on an all-tube amp head, which left me with more questions than answers. That little experience sent me on a quest to find the ideal amp and cab combo for my use-case: playing in front of a large audience (the cat) in a gigantic venue (my office). For the inquiring minds, the manatee on top of the stack is named Manny the Manatee and no, the delay was not part of the deal (I already owned it).  The requirements There are few requirements the setup must fulfill: Not take that much real-estate Be more powerful than my practice amp Have lots of headroom Be easy to tone-shape Have a tube preamp Must be able to get vintage and modern sounds Nice-to-have: Have an effects loop Have a post-preamp DI out Finding the cab was the easiest part. The amp required a lot more effort to figure out. The speaker cabinet Du

  What do you get when two pedal nerds decide to LARP working for Electro-Harmonix under Mike Matthews in 1975, the heyday of the "big box" EHX pedals, and they come up with a new circuit? You get this: the Lizard Queen Octave/Distortion pedal. It's a simple but effective design that truly encompasses everything Electro-Harmonix was about in the mid-1970's. The backstory Sometime in 2021, Josh Scott, from JHS Pedals, and Daniel Danger, graphics designer and "Electro-Harmonix Archivist", wanted to know what it would be like to work under Mike Matthews in 1975. They then decided to design a circuit that EHX would have produced back then using the processes and parts that were available at the time. It also had to be in a big box enclosure like all other EHX pedals of the era, because why not: they look cool and they make a statement! Over the course of the following year, they hand-built 6 "big box" units and gave one to the man himself,  Our Lord An

  I have a few things going on right now, and writing reviews and recording demos is not my top priority. Since I haven't published anything in a while, here is a short-ish one. -J.P. Why the roller coaster header image? Well, I couldn't find a suitable royalty-free image for an infinite loop, and that was the closest thing that made sense. As you might have guessed already, the cheapest pedal I found on Amazon this past April is... a looper! Without further ado, let's get right to the review. ammoon Loop Station It's one of those super-small "nano" pedals. In terms of dimensions, it is 3.6cm by 7.5cm by 2.6cm (width, length, height; that's 1¼" by 2¾" by 1" if metric is not your thing). It's smaller than my MXR Phase 95, which is a "regular nano" size (not to be confused by Electro-Harmonix concept of "nano", which only means "regular 1590B enclosure" instead of "1970's vintage big box enclosures&qu