digital

This year’s highlights include an obsession with Lehle switchers, a literal charcuterie board repurposed into a stomp station, a pedalboard project to celebrate years of sobriety, and a guitarist who plays his wah like he’s riding a skateboard. Enjoy!

When it comes to the pedalboard puzzle of assembling your guitar toys into an order that works for you and your sound, putting it all together is an adventure. Each year, we love to play voyeur to approaches wide and far … and learn about obscure stomps we’ve never tried before. Enjoy!

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BOSS announces the IR-200 Amp & IR Cabinet and SY-200 Synthesizer, two powerful new models added to the popular 200 series pedal lineup. The IR-200 brings next-level performance to direct sound for guitar and bass, offering exceptional audio quality, premium amps, and over 150 hi-res speaker cabinet impulse responses from BOSS and Celestion Digital. The SY-200 delivers a massive library of expressive synthesizer sounds for guitar and bass, onboard memories for storing sounds, and numerous options for real-time control.

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Heavy amp hardware in a petite package.

Dirty channel sounds amazing. Portable and light.

Clean channel isn't particularly loud on a 16-ohm cabinet.

$399

Hughes & Kettner AmpMan Modern
hughes-and-kettner.com

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Hughes & Kettner are good at anticipating trends. The 1991-introduced Tubeman, a pedal-sized preamp, offered full-spectrum DI sounds years before the modeling craze. Released two years before that, the Red Box was among the first cabinet simulators. Decades later, Hughes & Kettner is still tweaking those formulas to make amps a simpler, more flexible proposition. Their new AmpMan is a Red Box-equipped, all-analog, 2-channel, preamp and class D power amp—all packed into a compact, 2.5 pound, pedal-sized unit. And it's one of the most potent distillations of the H&K amp-slimming formula yet. The AmpMan is offered in two models: Classic and Modern. But for this review we took a turn with the higher-gain Modern version.

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