These are my pedals.
The black one with no label is an Akai Intelliphase, just rehoused. It's only got two knobs, very straightforward. I'm not a big fan of the phaser sound, but this one sounds really nice if used minimally.
To the right of that is the BYOC compressor, I bought this when I first found BYOC and was unsure of how easy it actually was it build a pedal. Tonewise, this compressor is very nice, but it lacks the squish I'm looking for, and it's very dirty sounding. I sold my Boss CS-3; tonewise the two are complete opposites. If you like clean metallic compression, the CS-3 is the way to go, but this comp is natural and gritty sounding but doesn't change your guitar's natural tone at all like the boss pedal does.
The EHX Soul Preacher is actually the perfect compressor, it's got everything I wanted in a comp. After playing around with 4 or 5 different ones, I think this is a keeper.
The EHX Holy Grail is a great reverb, I initially bought it because my old amp had amazing reverb but was way too quiet. When I got the new amp, it has a really shallow reverb tank, but this pedal adds all the reverb I need. One knob, three reverb types. I only really stick with the spring reverb, honestly. The only downside to the Holy Grail is the higher you turn that dial, the quieter the output is. I may have to get a volume pedal to help with this...
The big monster on the far right is the standard Dunlop crybaby wah. I'm not a wah guy, I just use this as a filter sometimes. I've had it forever and it's never done me wrong.
The MXR Blue Box is the weirdest pedal I've ever dealt with, it adds a ridiculous amount of fuzz, and also a note two octaves below what you're playing. I bought this because it was cheap and broken, just a quick repair and I was off. If the dial is all the way up, it really captures that J. Mascis tone. If the dial is lower, you can get really funky 8-bit videogame sounds. I love and hate this pedal at the same time, but I don't think I'd ever get rid of it.
The Boss DS-1 distortion sucks. It was the first pedal I ever bought and I hardly ever use it. I guess it's cool if you want to sound like a 15 year old playing Nirvana songs, because that's what I used it for. I am keeping it because eventually I think I'm going to try modding it or putting something into the housing.
The Devi Ever/Effector13 Disaster Fuzz is another wonky pedal. It's an oscillating fuzz, so it really screams, but it also will play a note on its own without plugging anything into it. I really love this pedal for noise jams.
The ProCo TurboRAT is phenomenal. It's like a RAT but it gets much dirtier and grittier. I've had this thing for 5 or so years now and it's almost always in my pedal train somehow. I think this is the only distortion pedal I really need.
The three metal boxes that are taking the brunt of my camera's flash are three I built - a delay, a tremelo, and a fuzz pedal. I got the kits off BYOC. The delay is very analog, very clean and precise. It's a beautiful thing. There's a dampening knob too, so you can adjust the volume of the delayed notes to get a soft, warm delay - or an abrasive nightmarish mess. It took some getting used to but I'm really warming up to this pedal. The tremelo is pretty good, it does what you'd expect. The fuzz pedal is a clone of the MKII Tonebender. This thing is harsh, metallic and monstrous. It's a really heavy pedal when you need to REALLY crank out the feedback and fuzz.
The last pedal is the orange one with a racing stripe... I bought this off ebay and I'm really not sure what to call it. It's a dirt pedal, definately, but it's not heavy like my other distortions. I use this pedal all the time while fingerpicking - it captures Matt Sweeny's slight distortion on the Superwolf album perfectly. It's great for adding just that thin layer of crunch that I'm looking for on most of what I play.
