gear award 2021

We've reviewed a ton of cool gear over the past 12 months, but these stood above the rest and won our coveted Premier Gear Award.

This year more than 40 guitars, basses, effects, and amps from a diverse group of gear makers earned the coveted Premier Gear Award from our discerning editors. Here is our gear of the year.

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Superb Universal Audio effects, now available for all, in stompbox size.

Superb spring, plate, and digital reverb tones. Logical interface. Solid construction. Compact size. Good price.

No MIDI. Power supply not included.

$399

Universal Audio Golden Reverberator
uaudio.com

5
5
4
5

Universal Audio's new UAFX guitar pedal line is genuinely newsworthy. The company's software emulations of vintage analog gear earn near-unanimous praise from producers and engineers. But until recently, UA software ran only on UA interfaces, such as the Apollo line of interface/preamp/convertors. That changed two years ago, with the release of the $1,299 OX Amp Top Box, a load box and speaker emulator incorporating several fine UA effects. And now UA effects are available in a relatively inexpensive stompbox format, thanks to the Astra Modulation Machine, Starlight Echo Station, and Golden Reverberator. Here, we focus on the reverb pedal.

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Inspired by a cult favorite, this decadently deviant "harmonizer" makes it an absolute breeze to indulge anti-tonal tendencies. The PG RPS Effects Arcade Machine review.

Fabulously freaky possibilities. Expression-pedal control maximizes mayhem potential by letting you scroll through all 11 intervals in real time.

Not for the tame. Masks the voice of virtually every pedal running into it, making signal-chain placement key.

$265

RPS Arcade Machine
rpseffects.com

5
4.5
4.5
4

Ask adventurous pedal builders to name the coolest weird pedal ever, and there's a good chance you'll hear something about the Schumann Electronics PLL. RPS Effects' aptly named new Arcade Machine is the latest of many available PLL homages. While others have shrunken and simplified the approach (EarthQuaker Devices' Data Corrupter and Mantic's Flex being perhaps the best known), the Arcade Machine remains on the large side, though it does manage to cut the number of controls from Schumann's 15 to 11—and to label their functions much more self-evidently.

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