distortion

Keeley Blues Disorder, Super Rodent & Angry Orange Demos | First Look
Keeley Angry Orange, Super Rodent, & Blues Disorder Demos | First Look

Three new flexible, combination gain machines offer a slate of overdrive, distortion, and fuzz sounds from rambunctious to raging.

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Take a straight line to stompbox satisfaction.

Tough, cutting, silicon fuzz tone with warmth and character. Satisfyingly simple to use. Super-solid build quality.

One-knob design comes with some tone-shaping limitations

$150

Catalinbread Fuzz
catalinbread.com

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A lot of Catalinbread’s best pedals, like the Echorec, Adineko, Belle Epoch, and Topanga, emulate the sounds and function of quirky and unruly electromechanical devices. Designing and building digital stompbox versions of these machines is not easy. The R&D can be intense. And you can imagine the obsessive traps one would encounter chasing a magical ghost tone lurking in the arcane workings of a drum delay or an oil can echo. Catalinbread’s new CB Series pedals, however, are a pivot in the direction of pure simplicity. For the company’s engineering department, developing these pedals must have been a bit like a summer art retreat.

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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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