"You can't miss with a Fulltone pedal, especially if it's the OCD. There's also a new improved version now, called OCD V2 which provides players not only with better sound quality but also with a better dynamic response. The only downside here is the use of Comic Sans font, which is a deal breaker for some."

"Here comes the infamous monster, the crusher of toan (yes, toan), the evilest of all the evil, the filthiest of all the filth – Metal Zone (pronounced "Zoan"). The legend goes that whoever designed this pedal was obsessed with hornet nests and decided to replicate the sound. The result was so frightening that only trvest of the trve metallers were brave enough to use it and produce some of the most scooped toans ever. But it was only when the trvest metaller from the North (most metal place on Earth btw), the mighty Ola Englund, decided to plug it in the FX return of his Satanistic amp that we heard this pedal's trve potential. Ola made Metal Zone great again and got Nobel Prize for it (trve story)."

"Though Kurt Cobain was more reliant on his Boss DS pedals, the Nirvana frontman was seeking something more extreme for Nevermind’s heaviest track, Territorial Pissings. He ended up using a blend of his Pro Co Rat distortion going straight into the Neve desk and his mic’d amp to unleash some of the highest levels of gain of their career."

"You’d have to have been frozen in a glacier for the past 3,000 years to not know about the Fuzz Face or the left-handed Strat player who made it famous. Introduced in 1966 by London’s Arbiter Music, the dynamic-sounding Fuzz Face represents mankind’s best use of two transistors, four resistors, and three capacitors."

"The Maestro Fuzz-Tone and Vox Tone-Bender might have preceded it, but the Fuzz Face made the biggest and longest-lasting impression on Fuzztown, and pumped countless star tones into the stratosphere besides, so it’s a deserving classic, no doubt. [...] The first unit hit London’s Sound City music shop in 1966, where one young pretender to the guitar throne soon to be known as Jimi Hendrix had taken to hanging out. He wasn’t pretending for long."

"This ultra-classic distortion box is known for its warm, tube-like growl and excellent dynamics and punch. If you could have only one distortion box, you couldn’t go wrong with a DS-1."

"DS-1 is a simple pedal that revolutionized the guitar world decades ago. The simple and cheap concept of one of these units in front of your amp is still a winning formula, even to this day. Why in the world would you need anything else? Right?"

"Pro Co RAT is another example of how some of the old stuff is still relevant today. In addition, many famous guitar players of various different genres used it over the years."

"Coming from the depths of hell... Actually, it comes from the 1980s, but that's pretty much the same thing. As the culture and music were changing, everyone was trying to be so extreme in whatever they were doing. So that's pretty much how extreme forms of metal came to be. And Boss HM-2 was every metalhead's biggest ally. Unless they were into glam metal. In that case, spandex was their biggest ally."

"This pedal goes way back to the late 1960s and early 1970s and has been used by many of our favorite guitar legends, including David Gilmour. It's one of the most notable distortion pedals with one of the most distinctive sounds."

"Though not quite the distortion-free sustainer the original EH ads cracked it up to be, the Big Muff’s soft-clipping and treble-rolloff circuitry yielded smooth, singing tones that were way more tube-like than any fuzzbox could deliver."

"Made famous by Eric Johnson, this definitive overdrive is a close cousin of the popular TS-9. The TS-808 delivers warm, grainy distortion, plenty of output, and has a strong upper-midrange bump that colors your guitar sound considerably."

"Ever since the early 1980s, Ibanez Tube Screamer in all its variants has been a standard for guitar players of various genres. From the fat blues driven tasty tones of Stevie Ray Vaughan to the incredibly heavy sounds of modern metal guitarists who use it as the boost for their lead channels, this pedal has seen it all."

"No sooner had Boss discontinued the HM-2 Heavy Metal in the early 90s than it was adopted as the de facto standard distortion box for Swedish death metal bands such as Entombed, Dismember and Grave. The bands’ producer Tomas Skogsberg, father of the ironically-named “Sunlight Sound”, repeatedly called upon the HM-2’s brutal, ripping distortion to create some of the darkest-sounding records ever made. In acknowledgement of its legacy, Boss released the Waza Craft HM-2W Heavy Metal in 2021."

"The Rat’s trademark hard clipping comes from a pair of silicon diodes, which yield an aggressive yet smooth distortion, all with a hint of fuzz. That distinctive tone led to players as diverse as Thom Yorke, Robert Fripp, and James Hetfield all making good use of the rodent over the years."