The Suede 100: The Best and Worst Guitar Pedals Ever Made

Sounds like every great tape echo you've ever heard, because it basically is. Still the reference, and still a machine rather than a pedal — a motor, a loop of actual tape, three playback heads you combine like chords, and a spring reverb bolted on for company. What no plugin has fully caught is the instability: the wow and flutter drift, the repeats degrade a little differently every pass, and the self-oscillation climbs rather than steps. That imprecision is the sound. What the reissues and emulations get right is everything except the maintenance bill, which is the honest reason to buy one of those instead. A real RE-201 needs tape, needs its heads cleaned, and will pick the worst possible night to remind you. If you are gigging, buy the emulation and sleep. If you are recording and you want the thing every producer has been chasing since 1974, this is the thing they were chasing.

An amp, a rack, and a computer shrank into a floor unit. Players who use it well use it very well, and the ones who don't are usually the ones who never got past the factory presets — which flatter the demo and misrepresent the machine. Helix is the modeler that finally made the interface the feature: real knobs, a real screen, a signal chain you can rearrange without a laptop. The models are good. They are not better than a good amp in a good room, and anyone telling you otherwise is describing a convenience as a virtue. What Helix actually buys you is repeatability — the same rig, at the same volume, in every room, night after night. That is worth an enormous amount to a working player and almost nothing to someone recording alone at home with an amp already in the corner. Know which one you are before you spend the money.

The best case for profiling: it worked. The worst case for profiling: everyone knows it worked and moved on. Kemper's bet was that you could capture a specific amp — your amp, that day, with that speaker and that mic — rather than model an amp in general, and the bet paid off well enough that profiles became a currency people trade. A good profile of a great amp is uncanny. A bad profile of a great amp is worse than a mediocre model, because it captures one static snapshot of something that was never static. That is the catch nobody puts on the box: you are buying a photograph, not the amp. The rack is dated now, the interface was never friendly, and Helix and the Axe-Fx caught up on usability years ago. It still sits here because when a profile is right, nothing else is closer. You just have to accept that "right" is someone else's judgment about a room you weren't in.

Before fuzz was fuzz. The grandfather doesn't need your approval and wasn't asking. The FZ-1 exists because a session engineer chased a broken preamp channel on a Marty Robbins date and decided the malfunction was worth keeping, and Gibson built a product around a mistake — which is the founding legend of the entire effects industry and, unusually, true. It sounds thin, splatty, and slightly rude, and it is nobody's idea of a modern fuzz. Buy one for what it is: the first, and a genuinely distinct voice that no Fuzz Face or Tone Bender covers. Do not buy one expecting the Satisfaction riff to arrive with it, because the sound that made that record famous was this circuit doing something the circuit was not designed to do. As a historical object it is unimpeachable. As a working pedal in 2026 it is a specialist tool that will spend most of its life off.

Does one thing. Does it correctly. Has been doing it since 2010 without complaint. The PolyTune's actual innovation — strum all six, see all six — sounds like a gimmick until the first time you fix a rig between songs in four seconds instead of forty. Everything since has copied it, which is the sincerest available review. The display is bright enough to read on a sunlit outdoor stage, the buffered and true-bypass versions both exist so the buffer argument is your problem rather than TC's, and the thing simply does not fail. It sits at 25 rather than higher for the only reason a tuner ever could: a tuner cannot make you sound better, it can only stop you from sounding worse. That is a real job and this is the best tool for it. If you are choosing between this and a cheaper mini tuner, the cheaper one is probably fine. If you are choosing between this and no tuner, you already know.

Genuinely good. Will not surprise you in either direction. The delay you reach for when you want delay. The DD-2 was the first digital delay in a compact pedal, which in 1983 meant a rack unit's chip smuggled into a stompbox, and the thing that has kept it relevant is the part Boss got wrong on purpose: 12-bit conversion and a limited bandwidth that makes the repeats sit under the dry signal instead of on top of it. Later Boss delays are cleaner and the cleanliness is the problem — a pristine repeat competes with the note that made it. Against a Carbon Copy it is tighter and less woolly; against a DM-2 it is more repeats and less warmth; against a Timeline it is one delay instead of twelve. If you want to hear the echo, get something modern. If you want the echo to hold the note up from underneath and get out of the way, this is still the answer, and the used prices have not fully caught on.

Two channels, one purpose: sound like the amp you wish you had. Succeeds often enough to justify the waitlist. Barely. The King of Tone is two low-gain drives in one box that stack into something genuinely amp-like, and the reason it inspires devotion is that it does almost nothing — it adds compression and a very slight midrange lift and otherwise gets out of the way of a good amp. That is a real skill and there are perhaps five pedals that do it this well. It is also the most oversold pedal in the boutique world, and the multi-year waitlist has done more for its reputation than the circuit ever could. Scarcity reads as quality to people who have not played one. Against a Plumes or a Timmy you are paying several times the money for a difference you will hear on the third A/B, not the first. Worth owning. Not worth waiting three years and paying resale for, and I say that as someone who did.

Does what it says, does it cleanly. The second version fixed what nobody complained about in the first. The OCD's trick is that it behaves less like an overdrive and more like a small amp being pushed — it cleans up hard off the volume knob, which is the property people actually mean when they say a pedal is "amp-like." The HP/LP switch is the real control: HP is the aggressive, mid-forward voice most people bought it for, LP is a fatter low-gain thing that gets ignored. Where the OCD gets divisive is the top end, which is bright bordering on brittle into the wrong amp, exactly like the BD-2 above and for the same reason. Version history is a mess and the v1.7 fetishism is mostly collector noise; the v2 is a slightly smoother pedal and a better buy at any price. Against a Tube Screamer it is louder, less mid-humped, and less polite. That is the whole pitch, and it is enough.

Genuinely strange. Not strange in a marketable way — strange in a way that occasionally produces something irreplaceable. The Fuzz Factory has five knobs, no correct settings, and a gate/starve interaction that will oscillate, squeal, and drop out mid-note, which is either the reason to own it or the reason to sell it within a month. It is not a rhythm fuzz. It is not a stack-with-everything fuzz. It is a machine for producing sounds nobody asked for, and about one setting in twenty is a genuinely new noise you cannot get any other way. That ratio is better than it sounds — most pedals produce zero. If you want a usable germanium fuzz, buy a Fuzz Face clone and be happy. If you want the pedal that made a generation of noise players sound like themselves, and you have the patience to spend an afternoon finding the one setting, this is unmatched and always has been.

An algorithm store in a box. Some algorithms are great. The interface is a negotiation you will lose at least once per gig. The H9 puts Eventide's rack heritage — H910, H3000, the pitch and modulation work that defined studio effects for two decades — into a small enclosure with one knob and one footswitch, and then asks you to drive it from a phone. In a studio that is fine. On a dark stage with a dying Bluetooth connection it is a design decision you will have opinions about. The algorithms that justify the whole thing are the pitch ones: Crystals, HarModulator, MicroPitch. Nothing else does those at this quality, and MicroPitch alone has ended more "why does my recorded guitar sound small" problems than any other single effect. Buy it for those. Do not buy it expecting a good reverb or a good delay for the money, because both exist cheaper and better. And buy the Max, or accept that the algorithm you need is a paid unlock away.

A compressor dressed up as a studio unit. Sounds excellent. Costs enough that you'll tell people how much it cost. The Cali76 is a discrete FET compressor with the 1176's attack and release behavior, and what separates it from every pedal compressor under two hundred dollars is that you can hear what it is doing and choose how much of it you want. Most guitar compressors have one attack time, hidden, and it is wrong for something. This one lets you set the attack slow enough to keep the pick transient — the single thing that makes compressed guitar sound alive rather than squashed — and the parallel dry blend means you can add sustain without losing dynamics at all. That combination is the entire argument. Against a Dyna Comp it is cleaner, quieter, and infinitely more adjustable; against a rack 1176 it is close enough that the difference is a studio conversation. The price is genuinely hard to justify until you have used it on a recording. Then it isn't.

Half the people who own one could use a shorter delay time and a smaller footprint. Sounds fine, though. The Carbon Copy is a bucket-brigade analog delay, which means each repeat gets darker and softer until it dissolves, and that decay curve is why it stayed on boards for nearly two decades: dark repeats do not fight the dry signal. The modulation switch is subtle and should probably be on. What people actually buy it for is the 600ms of delay time, and what they actually use is about 300 — long analog delay times are where bucket-brigade noise and smear become audible, so the top half of that knob is mostly a specification. Against a DM-2W it is a little cleaner and a little less characterful; against a digital delay it is warmer and much less precise. It is the correct first analog delay and an unambitious permanent one. The Mini version is the same circuit in a smaller box and is the one most people should buy.

Was a secret weapon before it became a punch line. Still punches. The secret is that it never actually left. The Distortion+ is two knobs, a germanium-diode clipping stage, and a midrange character so specific that you can identify it on a record from across a room — thin, nasal, and aggressive in a way that cuts through anything. Randy Rhoads built an entire tone on it. So did a lot of people who then denied it. What killed its reputation was the arrival of the Tube Screamer and the general 1980s consensus that drives should be smooth, and this one is not smooth; it is loud and rude and it does exactly one thing. Against a DOD 250 it is a near-twin with a slightly different diode voice and a much better enclosure. Against modern boutique gain it is unsophisticated and cheap, which is now the point. Buy it if your problem is that you disappear in the band. It will solve that problem and it will cost you eighty dollars.

The original chorus that made chorus legal. Everything since has been trying to replicate what this one did accidentally. The CE-1 came out of the Roland JC-120's onboard chorus circuit put in a box, which is why it does not sound like later chorus pedals: it is a bucket-brigade circuit running in stereo with a genuine vibrato mode, and the preamp stage colors the signal before the modulation ever gets to it. That preamp is the part clones miss. Run one with the chorus off and the guitar already sounds better, which is not a claim I make about many pedals. The downsides are real — it is enormous, it runs on mains power, it hums, and clean examples now cost more than a decent amp. Against a CE-2 you get stereo and a warmer preamp; against the modern reissues you get the actual circuit and the actual noise floor. This is a studio purchase and a collector's purchase. It is not a pedalboard purchase and has not been since about 1984.

Rust and sustain and a mid-scoop that turned a generation of guitarists into a genre. Not a compliment, exactly. The Op-Amp Big Muff replaced the four-transistor design with IC-based clipping to cut costs, and the accident of that cost-cutting is one of the most recognizable guitar sounds ever recorded: harder, flatter, more scooped, and considerably nastier than the transistor versions. Siamese Dream is this pedal, multiplied. What it is not is versatile. The mid scoop that makes it enormous alone makes it vanish completely in a band with a bass player and a vocalist, which is the single most common complaint about Big Muffs and the most acute on this one. The tone control's useful range is narrow. It stacks badly with everything. Against the Ram's Head it is more aggressive and less musical; against the Green Russian it is brighter and thinner. Buy it if you are layering guitars in a studio. Do not buy it as your only fuzz, and do not buy it to play live without a mid boost after it.

Has been on ten thousand boards since 1978 and will be on ten thousand more when we're gone. Fine. The DS-1 is the most-sold distortion pedal in history and its reputation is a tug-of-war between people who think it is garbage and people who think that opinion is a pose, and the truth is duller than either camp: it is a mid-scooped, buzzy, hard-clipped distortion that sounds bad alone and considerably better in a mix, which describes half the pedals ever recorded. It also sounds dramatically different depending on what follows it, and most people who hate it were hearing it into a solid-state amp on a shop floor. Into a cranked tube amp it is a different pedal. Kurt Cobain used one. Joe Satriani used one. They do not sound alike, which tells you the pedal is a smaller part of the equation than the argument suggests. At forty-five dollars new it is impossible to be wrong about. Buy one, decide for yourself, and stop reading forum posts about it.

Every wah sounds like this, which is either because this got it right or because nobody tried anything else. True for both. The GCB-95 is the default wah on earth and it is a genuinely mediocre pedal that is nonetheless the correct first wah for almost everyone, because it is cheap, indestructible, endlessly modifiable, and it is the sound in your head when you think of a wah. The complaints are legitimate and universal: it tone-sucks badly when bypassed, the sweep is narrow, the pot wears out and gets crackly within a couple of years of real use, and the switch requires a stomp rather than a press. Every one of those is fixable — true bypass, a better pot, a different inductor — and there is a whole cottage industry doing exactly that, which tells you the platform is sound and the execution is cost-driven. Against a Vox V847 it is brighter and less vocal; against a boutique wah it is worse in every measurable way and eighty percent as good in the mix.

An octave pedal small enough to forget about until you need it, at which point you need it very badly. The Micro POG's achievement is tracking — polyphonic pitch shifting that holds together on full chords, which every analog octave pedal before it flatly could not do. That single property changed what an octave pedal is for. Instead of a monophonic bass-note trick you use on one riff, you get a twelve-string shimmer, an organ-adjacent sub, and a genuine range extension you can leave on for a whole song. Three knobs, no menu, no presets, nothing to learn. The limits are real: the up-octave has a synthetic edge you cannot dial out, the tracking gets glitchy on very low, very fast passages, and there is no dry-kill for the pure-synth sounds the bigger POG does. Against the POG2 you lose the attack and filter controls, which most people never touched. This is the version to buy and it has been for twenty years.

A reverb that became a default. Defaults happen for reasons. The reason here is that it sounds like a reverb should. blueSky is three machines — spring, plate, hall — three decays, and a low/high damping pair, and its entire design philosophy is that you should be able to set it once and forget it exists. It succeeds so completely that it became the reference other reverb pedals get compared against, which is a strange fate for a pedal whose defining trait is that it does not draw attention to itself. The shimmer mode is the one everybody demos and the one you will use least. What matters is the plate: dense, even, and it does not smear the pick attack, which is where cheap reverbs give themselves away. Against a Hall of Fame it is smoother and more expensive; against NightSky it is far less capable and far more likely to still be on your board in three years. If you want one reverb and you never want to think about reverb again, buy this one.

Four discreet chorus modes, none of them labeled "chorus." Roland understood something about restraint that nobody has quite replicated. The Dimension D is a stereo chorus with no knobs at all — four buttons, and you can press more than one — and the absence of controls is the design. There is no rate, no depth, nothing to set wrong. What comes out is a widening rather than a wobble: the pitch modulation is shallow enough that you never hear it as vibrato, only as the guitar becoming larger and stereo becoming real. That is the effect nearly every chorus pedal fails at by giving you a depth knob and letting you ruin it. It is a rack unit, it needs stereo to do anything at all, and in mono most of the magic collapses. Against a CE-1 it is subtler and cleaner; against every modern chorus pedal it is less flexible and more tasteful. If you record in stereo, this is the one to find. If you play in mono, it is not for you and never was.

A Klon derivative that doesn't hide what it is. The honesty is refreshing. The second knob still isn't doing much. Wampler shipped the Tumnus at a price that made the entire Klon-clone economy look ridiculous, and the pedal earns it: the germanium clipping, the clean-blend architecture, and the midrange lift that makes a Klon a Klon are all here and all working. Cranked clean with the gain low, it does the thing the original is actually famous for — a hard, forward mid push that makes a guitar sit in front of a band without getting louder in a way anyone resents. Where it falls short of a real Centaur is at the extremes: the top end is grainier at high gain and the pedal does not have the original's uncanny sustain at low volumes. Against a KTR it is close and one-fifth the money. Against the original it is not the same pedal, and anyone claiming it is has an interest in you believing that. Buy the Deluxe if you want the extra EQ; the standard is the better value.

The DD-3 with a tap tempo. Long overdue. Sounds exactly like the DD-3. That's the review — but the review deserves an explanation, because "exactly like the DD-3" is a compliment being delivered flatly. The DD-3's repeats are bright, clean, and slightly brittle, and there is a specific job that voicing does better than any warm analog delay: rhythmic, audible, in-time echo that stays legible under a busy arrangement. Dark repeats blur; these don't. Adding tap tempo to it fixed the one thing that made the pedal unusable live, which was setting a delay time by ear between songs with a small knob and no visual feedback. That is not a small fix. What you still do not get is modulation, subdivision options beyond the basics, or any warmth at all. Against a DD-8 you lose features and gain nothing. Against a Carbon Copy it is the opposite pedal in every respect. Buy it if you want your delays heard rather than felt.

A phase shifter that sounds like a phase shifter, which has been enough for fifty years and remains enough. The Small Stone is four stages of phasing with one rate knob and a color switch, and the color switch is the whole pedal: off is a gentle sweep, on adds feedback and turns it into the syrupy, seasick warble that is on more seventies records than anyone has counted. It is deeper and more liquid than a Phase 90, which is the comparison everyone makes, and it is also noisier and volume-drops slightly when engaged, which is the reason people go back to the MXR. Neither pedal is better. They are different sounds and the Small Stone is the more extreme one. The Nano reissue is a faithful, cheap, board-friendly version and there is no good reason to pay vintage prices unless you specifically want the Russian-era version, which is a different and murkier circuit. Buy it if a Phase 90 has ever struck you as too polite.

Spring, plate, hall — three settings, correct settings, nothing else. The Holy Grail earned its name by not overcomplicating it. The spring is the reason to buy it: it is a genuinely convincing amp-spring emulation, drippy and slightly boingy in the way a real tank behaves when you knock it, and it costs a fraction of what the boutique spring emulators charge. The hall is fine. The flerb — the modulated setting on some versions — is a novelty. What you are giving up against a blueSky or a Hall of Fame is control: there is one knob, it sets the amount, and if the decay is wrong for your song you have no recourse. That constraint is exactly why it works for people who keep buying reverb pedals and never touching the parameters. It is also noisy by modern standards and the Nano enclosure runs on a proprietary power draw that has surprised people. Buy it if you have a solid-state amp with no reverb and no patience.

A vibrato pedal, which means exactly twelve percent of players will use it correctly and the rest will return it. True pitch vibrato — no dry signal, the whole note moving — is a much harder effect to place in a mix than chorus, because there is nothing steady underneath it and the ear notices immediately when the pitch is wrong. Used well, on a clean arpeggiated part at a low rate, it is one of the most beautiful things a guitar can do. Used badly it sounds like a broken tape machine. The VB-2W is Boss's Waza Craft revival of a genuinely rare 1982 pedal, and it adds two things worth having: an unlatched mode that lets you hold the effect for a phrase rather than a section, and a custom voicing with a wider depth range. The Rise Time control is the good knob and the one nobody uses. Against a Dimension C it is a completely different job. Buy it only if you already know you want vibrato, not to find out.

A Russian Big Muff clone that sounds excellent and exists primarily because the original became too expensive to actually use. Wren and Cuff built the Tall Font Russian around the specific green Sovtek-era circuit — the one with a fatter low end and a less severe mid scoop than the American versions — and matched the component values closely enough that the comparison is a fair fight rather than a tribute. It is thick, it holds low notes together instead of turning them to wool, and it stacks in front of a dirty amp better than any Muff has a right to. The build is proper and the enclosure is normal-sized, which the originals were emphatically not. What keeps it at 59 rather than higher is that it is still a Big Muff, with a Big Muff's narrow tone control and a Big Muff's disappearing act in a full band. Against an original Green Russian it is cheaper, quieter, more available, and about ninety-five percent there. That is the correct trade.

Six reverb modes in a box the size of a hardback novel. Why the size. Nobody asked. It's fine. The Cathedral's modes cover spring, room, hall, plate, grail and a reverse, plus infinite hold and a tap-tempo-adjustable pre-delay, and the sound quality is honestly good — the plate in particular holds up against pedals costing three times as much. The reverse is the fun one and the reason people keep it after they have bought something smaller. Everything about the presentation works against it. The enclosure is enormous in an era where board space is the binding constraint, the power draw is high, the mode selector requires bending down to read, and the whole thing looks like it was designed in 2009, because it was. That is a packaging failure rather than a sonic one and it is the entire reason this sits at 61 instead of the forties. Against a Holy Grail you get five more modes and four times the footprint. Buy it used, where the size has already been priced in.

A reverb with a TonePrint slot, which means you can load someone else's reverb onto your reverb. Progress of a kind. Underneath the gimmick the Hall of Fame 2 is a competent, quiet, well-voiced multi-reverb with a genuinely useful addition the first version lacked: a pressure-sensitive footswitch that gives you a momentary shimmer or freeze without a second switch. That is a real performance feature and almost nobody mentions it. The reverbs themselves are good rather than distinctive — the plate and room are clean and unobtrusive, the church and shimmer are the ones that will date your recordings — and the whole thing sits in the price bracket where it has to fight the blueSky above it and the Holy Grail below it. It loses to the blueSky on sound and beats it on features and price. The TonePrint system remains a solution to a problem no guitarist has ever articulated. Buy it if the momentary switch appeals; otherwise this is a competent pedal in a crowded room.

Eight delay modes, four inputs, a soft bypass, and a display. The second mode is the first mode with a longer tail. That is unkind and mostly accurate — the EchoSystem's mode list has real range at the edges, with a genuinely good tape emulation and a multi-tap that does things no simpler delay can, but the middle of the list is a set of variations most players will never distinguish by ear. What Empress got unambiguously right is the engineering underneath: the routing options are the most flexible on any delay pedal, the stereo implementation is true stereo rather than a widened mono, and the whole thing is quieter than pedals costing more. It is a studio and large-board pedal for someone who needs one delay to cover every job on a record. It is emphatically not a pedal for someone who wants a delay sound, because it does not have one — it has eight competent impressions of other people's. Against a Timeline it is deeper and less intuitive. Against a DD-3 it is a different profession.

A New Zealand overdrive that sounds genuinely excellent and gets about one-fifth the press it deserves. This is the press. The HotCake predates the Tube Screamer's dominance and does something almost nothing else does: it adds gain and level without removing low end, so a humbucker into a HotCake stays full rather than getting the familiar mid-hump-and-bass-cut treatment. The Presence control is the good one — it is a genuine high-frequency shelf rather than a tone rolloff, so you can add gain to a dark amp and gain brightness rather than lose it. Paul Crowther built these by hand for decades and the pedal never had a marketing department, which is the whole explanation for its obscurity. It is not subtle at high gain and it is not a transparent drive; it has a specific fat, slightly compressed voice you either want or don't. Against a Tube Screamer it is the pedal you buy when the Tube Screamer's bass cut is the thing ruining your sound. Chronically underrated, and I mean that literally.

Named after a religion, sounds like an amp you can't afford, sits in a mix like it belongs there. Usually does. The Zendrive is an attempt at the specific compressed, vocal, singing quality of a Dumble-style amp, and while nobody who has not owned a Dumble can honestly evaluate that claim, the pedal succeeds on its own terms: a smooth midrange, a soft clipping character that does not fizz, and a Voice knob that controls the presence of upper harmonics rather than simply rolling off treble. That Voice control is what separates it from the Tube Screamer family. It wants a clean amp with headroom and it rewards a neck pickup and a light touch. It does not do aggression, it does not do modern gain, and into a small solid-state amp it sounds flat and confused. There are now many clones of it, several very good, and the original's price has drifted up on reputation. Buy it if your playing lives in the low-gain, sustained, melodic register. Skip it if you strum hard.

British gain, American pedal format, designed for players who want the brown sound without the brown amp budget. Delivers adequately. The BE-OD is Dave Friedman's BE-100 amp channel squeezed into a pedal, and it is a genuinely high-gain distortion rather than an overdrive with ambition — tight low end, aggressive upper mids, and enough gain on tap to be silly. The Tight control is the useful one: it high-passes the input before the gain stage, which stops palm-muted low notes from turning into mud, and it is the single feature most high-gain pedals get wrong. What "adequately" is doing in that first sentence is carrying the comparison to the actual amp, which this does not replace and does not particularly resemble at volume. It also needs a clean, loud platform underneath it and sounds bad into an already-dirty amp. Against a Rat it is tighter and more modern; against an amp it is a compromise you take on a fly date. Correct purchase for a specific problem, oversold as a general one.

Multi-tap modulated delay with an interface that makes sense only after you've used it wrong for a week and a half. Polymoon's actual sound is remarkable and undersold by its own marketing: cascading multi-tap delays feeding a modulation stage feeding a barber-pole phaser, which produces a rising, endlessly-climbing ambience that no other delay pedal makes. On a clean guitar with the dynamics up it is one of the most distinctive textures available in a pedal. The problem is the six-knob-plus-alt-function interface, which puts two parameters on every control and expects you to remember which. There is no display. There is no obvious mapping. Recalling a sound you found yesterday is genuinely difficult without writing it down, and the presets require an external switch to access, which is an extra purchase nobody mentions in the demos. Against a Timeline it is stranger and much harder to drive; against a Volante it is a different species. Buy it for the sound, budget a fortnight for the interface, and buy the expression pedal.

A reverb named after a NASA probe that sounds like outer space, which is either a feature or a description of the problem. Mercury7 is an Eventide-lineage algorithmic reverb — Meris's founders came from that world and it shows — built around two algorithms, Ultraplate and Cathedra, with pitch and modulation woven into the tail rather than bolted on. Ultraplate is the one you will use: dense, bright, and it stays out of the midrange where the guitar lives. Cathedra is the enormous one, and it is genuinely beautiful in a way that will make you write a part you would not otherwise have written. It is also completely inappropriate for most songs, which is the recurring theme with ambitious reverbs. The interface is four knobs with alt functions and no display, so the same recall problem as the Polymoon applies. Against a blueSky it is more interesting and less useful. Against NightSky it is cheaper, simpler, and does about sixty percent of the same thing. Buy it if your music has space in it.

The compressor that sounds like compression is supposed to sound: invisible until you turn it off, at which point you miss it. That is the kind sentence. The unkind one is that the Dyna Comp is two knobs, a fixed and fairly fast attack, and a noise floor that becomes conversation-stopping at high sustain settings — it squashes the pick transient in a way that makes fast playing sound smeared, and there is no control to fix it because there is no control. What it does brilliantly is the exact thing it was designed for in 1972: country and funk parts where you want every note the same size and the attack softened deliberately. On a Telecaster playing chicken-pickin' it is definitive and nothing modern sounds more correct. Against a Cali76 it is a blunt instrument at a tenth the price. Against a Keeley-modded version, the mod adds a blend and fixes the main complaint. Buy the modern reissue, keep it low, and understand you are buying a color rather than a utility.

A fuzz designed to be wrong, which it accomplishes. If you bought this, you have a story. Nobody asked to hear it. The Supersonic Fuzz Gun is a gated, oscillating, deliberately unstable fuzz with a Fuzz Gun knob that sweeps through a range of self-oscillation pitches, which means it makes noises that have no relationship to the note you played. That is the product. Used with intent — one section of one song, as an event rather than a tone — it is genuinely thrilling and there is nothing else that does it. Used as a fuzz, it is unusable: it does not track, it does not clean up, it does not stack, and the volume jumps unpredictably between settings. Death By Audio built this for a specific New York noise-rock context and never pretended otherwise, which is more honest than most. Against a Fuzz Factory above it is less controllable and less rewarding for the same money. Buy it if you already know exactly which four bars you need it for.

A clean boost so simple it almost isn't there — which is exactly the point. One knob. You either need it or you don't. The SHO is a single-transistor MOSFET boost with a large amount of available gain and a deliberately bright, slightly forward voicing, and its defining property is that it does not compress. Most boosts squash a little as they push; this one just gets louder and stays open, which is why it works so well in front of an amp that is already at the edge of breakup. Turned up past halfway it stops being clean and starts adding its own bright, spiky character, which is either a bonus or the reason people say it is harsh. It is also completely useless to anyone whose amp has headroom to spare, because a boost into a clean amp is just a volume change. That is the "you either need it or you don't." Against a Micro Amp it is brighter and higher-gain; against a transparent drive it does less on purpose. Cheap, small, permanent.

An octave pedal from 1982 that sounds like 1982, which is either a feature or a reason to buy the newer one. The OC-2 is analog, monophonic, and tracks badly — play a chord and it produces a confused warble, play above the twelfth fret and it loses the plot, play anything fast and it stutters. Every one of those failures is why people still buy it. The specific glitchy, synth-adjacent sub-octave it produces on a single low note is a sound the polyphonic pedals cannot make, because they are too good at their job. It is on an enormous number of records for exactly that reason, and it is the correct pedal for a bass-doubling line or a deliberately artificial low register. It is the wrong pedal for anything requiring chords, speed, or reliability. Against a Micro POG it is worse at everything and irreplaceable at one thing. The OC-5 adds polyphonic tracking and a range control and is the better general-purpose buy; the OC-2 is the better sound.

A flanger that achieves maximum flanger: if you want that sound, this is that sound. If you don't, nothing here for you. The M117 is the jet-plane sweep in its most unapologetic form — deep, metallic, and utterly uninterested in subtlety — and the reason it stayed in production while most flangers died is that its regeneration control goes far enough to reach genuine resonant howl, which the polite ones cannot. Set slow with the width up it produces the sweeping whoosh that defines a very specific late-seventies sound. Set fast it produces a metallic ring that is closer to a ring modulator than a chorus. There is no gentle setting worth using; a flanger set gently is a bad chorus. That single-mindedness is why it is ranked here rather than lower, because a pedal that commits is more useful than a pedal that hedges. Against an Electric Mistress it is cleaner and less liquid. Buy it only if you have already identified a song that needs a flanger, which most people never do.

A looper with one button and one purpose, which is admirable, until the one button stops registering and the purpose disappears. The Ditto's design case is unimpeachable: one knob, one footswitch, five minutes of loop time, unlimited overdubs, true bypass, and a footprint smaller than a phone. For practising over a progression or building a part on the fly it is exactly right and there is nothing to learn. The problem is mechanical rather than conceptual. The single switch has to distinguish press, double-press, and press-and-hold, which means loop, stop, and clear all live on one piece of hardware, and the failure mode when that switch wears — and they wear — is that you clear a loop you meant to stop. There is no undo for that. Against a Boss RC-5 you lose the display, the storage, and the second switch, all of which matter live. Buy the Ditto for a practice room. Buy something with two switches for a stage.

Cost $59. Hit $800 used after one YouTube video. DigiTech reissued it. Everyone discovered it was a Tube Screamer all along. The Bad Monkey is a two-band-EQ Tube Screamer variant that was sold in the bargain bin for fifteen years, and its brief career as a collectible is the single clearest demonstration on this list that the pedal market runs on narrative rather than sound. Nothing about the circuit changed. A video suggested it was a secret, scarcity did the rest, and prices multiplied by thirteen for a pedal that was still in production warehouses. Then the reissue landed, the price collapsed, and the people holding four of them at resale learned something expensive about gear culture. On the merits it is fine: the separate low and high controls are genuinely more useful than a single tone knob, the drive is standard TS-family compression and mid-hump, and the mixer output is a real feature. At sixty dollars it is a good pedal. At eight hundred it was a mirror.