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.

Mesa Boogie need no introduction when it comes to guitar amps but they have been absent from the effect market for years, after they retired their tube based V-Twin and V-1 Bottle rocket pedals.

For their return to the scene, they have just launched no less than four drive pedals. Gone are the tubes but their compact size is welcome in these times of overcrowded pedal boards.

These stompboxes cover the whole range of drive needs: clean boost with the Tone Burst, tasty overdrive with the Grid Slammer, enhanced (gainier) overdrive with the Flux Drive and outright big high gain tones with the Throttle Box. All of this with a definitive Boogie twist, check them out!

Innovating when it comes to “basic” effects has become difficult and therefore rare but Maxon has just released the DB10, a pedal based on a pretty cool concept: they have put two booster pedals into one compact enclosure and each booster has its own input and output connectors.

The “clean” booster side has a flat response and gives you 20dB of boost without altering the tone while the other one, the “vintage” side, has highs slightly rolled off and a mid range boost.

It means that you can place a distortion pedal after the vintage side in order to give it a kick but before the “flat” booster which becomes your “turn me up for solos” side.