Happy new year folks! I have been super busy with things that are totally unrelated to the guitar but it’s time to resume our journey through the land of tone.

I will start the year with a mini-series of posts presenting a selection of new effects announced at the NAMM show (which has just ended)

Let’s start with three new Boss compact pedals for 2013: the DA-2 adaptative distortion, the MO-2 Multi Overtone (a modulation unit) and the TE-2 Tera Delay.

They are based on a new technology called Multi-Dimensional Processing. At first, I thought, hmm, more digital stuff – not that I have anything against digital effects but sometimes I like to think that Boss might release some nitty-gritty analog stuff, the way they used to.

Anyway, after careful scrutiny, I find these new models to be quite innovative in a sense that their settings depart from the usual distortion/delay/modulation pedal settings and they seem to offer a very broad range of tones. They are also supposed to “smartly react” to whatever signal you put in. For instance, the DA-2 will make the sound chunkier on heavy riffs played on the bass strings whereas it will add some mid-range when it’s time for a lead part. Here is a video showing the DA-2 in action with a glimpse of the other pedals.