Saturation effects pedals guides & articles

Fuzzzzz! This onomatopoeia used to describe the first distorted sounds of an amp is hardly a stranger to any guitar player. The fuzz is obviously a distortion effect, but it's a also a culture in its…

The overdrive pedal is one of the most timeless and classic effects for electric guitar, and finding the overdrive of your dreams can be a lifelong endeavor. They have become a true cult object and m…

With over 100 overdrive pedals listed on just one gear-shopping website, how does one choose the top five? The first order of business is to define the terms: An overdrive pedal should have enough vo…

For many guitarists, the first thing that comes to mind when they hear the term “fuzz box” is the Big Muff Pi from Electro-Harmonix. With the new Deluxe Big Muff Pi, the company has added some cool a…

This year, Boss has been releasing new stompboxes at a prodigious pace: two at Winter NAMM and three at Summer NAMM. All are reinventions of older Boss pedals. The DS-1X, released along with the OD-…

The Boss OD-1X OverDrive was one of two new stompboxes the company announced at NAMM 2014 (the DS-1X Distortion was the other). It features the company’s recently developed Multi-Dimensional Processi…

Since the days of the original Big Muff Pi, Electro-Harmonix has been building distortion pedals, and one of its latest entries is the EHX Tortion ($179). Way more than just a distortion effect, it a…

On the occasion of our recently published Palmer Mutterstolz distortion pedal review, your favorite website decided to revisit some of the German brand's Root Effects, and here we review Automat, an …

Back in the day when fluorescent colors were in fashion, amps resembled fridges, all the songs on the radio had a guitar solo after the second chorus, and the Berlin Wall was still standing (Bingo!, …

Let me introduce you today to a pedal series directly from the U.S. of A.

The market of guitar stompboxes is quite saturated — competition is hard, manufacturers fight against each other with new controls and serial numbers. While I was reviewing a Blues 3000, I got the fe…

All experienced fans of long-haired distortion know the famous Soldano SLO-100 made in the 80's: this amp seduced big names in the guitar world — nobody less than Eric Clapton, Mike Landau, Lou Reed.…

So the bad news is, it’s virtually impossible to tell what the distortion pedal sounds like without auditioning it personally.

Music is universal — even people in New Zealand, who live down under, play music. They even make guitar stompboxes. And of course, that's what interests us more here at AudioFanzine. Focus on four an…

If you're a guitarist and you're not into multiband distortion...well, you should be. Just as multiband compression delivers a smoother, more transparent form of dynamics control, multiband distortio…

If you are interested in guitar stompboxes, you must choose between two different worlds: you've got the mass-produced effect pedals that use more or less average-quality components for cost savings …