The five most fluffed pedals of the year.

June 30 is the halfway mark, which makes this the right week to audit the praise. The five pedals below are the ones the press and the algorithm have spent the last twelve months treating like events. Every one of them is good. That is the point. Bad pedals get returned and forgotten. Good pedals get kept, so nobody circles back to ask whether the coverage matched the box. It rarely does, and no villains are required. The gear press is ad-supported. Review units are free loans. Embargo day rewards whoever plays nicest, and affiliate links pay on the click, not on whether the pedal is still on your board in a year. Every incentive rounds up, so every verdict rounds up. This is my mid-year correction, with what to buy instead at each price.

Number one is the Strymon BigSky MX at $679. I owned the original BigSky for six years and wrote a whole column about it: the pedal won on interface, not algorithms, and the interface is a genuine triumph. The MX is two hundred dollars more of the same verdict. The processor is much faster, the original twelve algorithms got rebuilt, and the honest new feature is running two reverbs at once. The coverage treated that as a coronation. It is a spec. The number of working players who need two simultaneous reverbs is roughly the number who post board photos for a living. Buy a used original for about $350 and keep the interface and the Hall that made the name. Buy a Boss RV-200 at $260 if you never cared about the interface. The extra money is for the second reverb, and you do not need the second reverb.

Number two is the Hologram Chroma Console at $399, the most photographed pedal in my feed for the past year, and it is not close. Hologram earned the benefit of the doubt with the Microcosm, and the Console is beautifully designed: four sections named Character, Movement, Diffusion, and Texture, plus a gesture recorder that captures your knob moves and plays them back. The coverage called it a new instrument. A year of watching actual boards says people use the wobble and the crush and skip the rest. Lo (lo.flannery) bought one the week it shipped, keeps it on the ambient board, loves it, and has never once armed the gesture recorder at a gig. If the wobble is the part you want, a Fairfield Shallow Water is about $225 street and does it with more menace. The Console is a very good texture box. It is not a genre.

Number three is the Universal Audio Enigmatic '82 Overdrive Special at about $400 street, which is what happens when Dumble worship meets a launch calendar. The modeling is serious work; UA does not ship lazy code. But the pedal got covered as a loophole into a six-figure amplifier, and that framing did the lifting the circuit cannot. I ran one at a session in April next to the house Zendrive, and the room could not reliably tell which was which through a Deluxe Reverb. A Zendrive is about $200 street. It needs no app, no presets, and no discourse. Same church, half the price.

Number four is the MXR Duke of Tone at $129, and it hurts to put it here because the pedal is a bargain. It is a real Analogman collaboration, a Prince of Tone circuit in an MXR shell with the same boost, overdrive, and distortion toggle, and mine has lived on the small board since it arrived. The fluff was the frame. A year of coverage sold it as the end of the King of Tone waitlist, and it is not that. The King of Tone is two of these circuits in one box, tuned, with a waitlist famously measured in years, and the people in that line want the badge as much as the sound. Buy the Duke because it is the best $129 overdrive money currently buys. Do not buy it believing you skipped the line. There is no skipping a line people stand in on purpose.