When I was 16 the sound engineer at my church told me to get a compressor because my levels were all over the place. This would have been a good idea- except that when I got a compressor, my guitar playing friends told me to put it at the beginning of my signal chain. A lot of the dynamic issues that I had were due to stacking overdrives, not my playing itself, and so this did nothing to appease the sound engineer and actually degraded my tone. Thus began my complicated relationship with compressor pedals. Many players have difficulty understanding and implementing compression, even though it is one of the keys to so many great guitar sounds. There are many...

We are very excited to announce that at long last, the Sick As Overdrive is back in stock! If you've been following us over the past year, you may know that last October we moved back home to Sydney, Australia. We have been working to set up shop all year,  while Disaster Area Designs have graciously handled our production for us, and we are excited to announce that this is the first batch of pedals we have built here in Sydney! We've spent the year setting up new suppliers, learning the local regulations for running a business, and learning new skills. In our last blog we detailed some of the results of what Jon has been learning this year with...

Bypass switching has been a topic of controversy among guitar players for many years, in particular the debate of true-bypass vs buffered-bypass switching since the advent of the boutique pedal industry. While there are many examples of very good buffered-bypass pedals within this premium industry segment by high end producers like Klon or Pete Cornish, if a buffer does not match impedances correctly or is poorly designed, it can end up loading down your signal in a way colloquially known as a "bad buffer". True-bypass came out more or less as the de-facto winner of this debate due to poorly designed buffers in certain mass produced pedals, and the comparative ease of installing a true bypass switching system with a single mechanical 3PDT...