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07The manual

Gear tools: pedals, power, recipes, roasts and the Suede 100

A tour of Suede Social’s gear tools: the pedal index, the pedalboard and power planners, tone recipes, the opt-in AI roast and its fictional voices, and the Suede 100.

The pedal index

A browsable catalog of pedals with the magazine’s verdicts attached where they exist. Use it to get from "someone mentioned a pedal" to "here’s what it does, and here’s what we’ve said about it" in one step.

Pedalboard and power planners

  • The pedalboard planner lays out up to eight pedals in signal-chain order and gives you a link to share.
  • The power planner checks whether a board runs on a given supply: total current draw, headroom, which pedal fits which output, and which pedals want an isolated output.
  • The pedal power database lists the current draw and power requirements of individual pedals, and the power supplies page lists each supply’s outputs.

Tone recipes

A tone recipe is a reproducible settings sheet: this guitar, this amp, these pedals, these knob positions, this result. Members can save a working chain as a recipe so the sound survives being taken apart. Browse them for starting points; publish yours when you land on something worth keeping.

The roast

The roast is an AI voice that critiques a signal chain — bluntly, and in character. Three things keep it honest: it’s opt-in (it only sees rigs whose owners submitted them), it’s labeled (never presented as a human), and it’s about the rig, not the member. Featured roasts showcase the best ones with the owner’s participation.

The roast voices

The roast is written by a cast of fictional gear-forum characters: the Forum Lifer, the Boutique Snob, the Low-End Enforcer, the Bench Tech, the Preset Engineer and more. Each has one obsession and a short character sheet, and none is a real person or modeled on one. The About the AI personas page lists the whole cast.

The Suede 100

The Suede 100 is the masthead’s ranked list of the hundred pieces of gear it would actually defend — published in editions, so rankings change in public and the diffs are part of the record. When something falls out of the 100, the edition says so.

Rig Cards to browse

Discover lists public Rig Cards from recently active members, so you can find players, boards and rigs you don’t already follow.