In conjunction with our Black Friday sale this year, we’re releasing eight (!) all-new traces with full tracing journals. Each of these is a never-before-seen schematic, and we have new PCBs available for each of them. We’ve also …
The Keeley Compressor Plus was first released in 2017 as an update to their classic 4-knob compressor. Here’s a video demo from Andy Martin: Compared to the earlier version, the input gain (anti-clipping) control has been removed and …
The Catalinbread Octapussy was originally released in 2012. It was modeled after vintage transistor octave fuzzes like the Octavia. Here’s a demo: They compare it to the Octavia but claim it’s an original design. There are only a …
Today we’re releasing two new Xotic traces. The Xotic SL Drive is a miniature drive pedal that was released in the summer of 2013. It was designed to emulate the tone of an overdriven Marshall Super Lead (hence …
The second Xotic trace releasing today (alongside the SL Drive) is the EP Booster. It’s a fairly simple JFET booster modeled after the preamp of the Echoplex tape delay pedal. Here’s a demo video from Mike Hermans: The …
The Amptweaker Tight Fuzz was first released in 2012, a year after the Tight Metal and two years after the Tight Drive. It was James Brown’s take on a classic transistor fuzz, but incorporating his characteristic design style …
Next up we have the Amptweaker Tight Drive. This is the very first pedal from Amptweaker, the pedal company founded by amp guru James Brown, designer of the legendary Peavey 5150 amplifier among many others. Released in 2010, …
The Catalinbread Silver Kiss was first released in 2007. It’s a more traditional overdrive than their other offerings, but with the addition of an active 3-band EQ. Here’s a demo from Gearmanndude: The discussion at Freestompboxes first began …
Next on the bench is the Stamps Drive-O-Matic. Built by Robert Stamps of The Amp Shop in LA in the mid-1990s, it was a very early example of a boutique pedal, all hand-built in small quantities. Despite this, …
While reviewing the Honey Bee Overdrive circuit for the updated Procyon V2, we spent some time digging to see if we could determine why there are so many different versions of the circuit—not just component variants, but actual …