september

After a very slow summer with few new releases,  pedal builders seemed to be awakening in September, unleashing a series of exciting brand new devices that spurred frantic online searching activity. For the unaware, our appointment with The Monthly StompBuzz updates our readers on the most searched, and therefore hyped, pedals of the previous 30 days.

The list below highlights the stompboxes that had the most Google searches in the Month of September 2020*. For this edition, we improved our tracking by aggregating searches on our site with broader data coming from Google Trends.

It must be noted that uber-hyped pedals released late in September like the JHS Pedals Series 3, the Chase Bliss/Meris Collaborative Reverb, the Third Man Coppersound Triplegraph or the BOSS RC-5 Loopstation didn’t have enough days in the month to gather enough hits to put them in the top 10 – they might very well make it in next month’s chart, though.

Another thing to consider is that some pedals like the DSM & Humboldt Simplifier are searched in many different ways (like “Simplifier Pedal,” “Humboldt Simplifier,” or “DSM Simplifier”) while others, like the Empress Zoia, are almost always searched one way – we try to keep that in mind when we compile these lists.

Here is the chart of the ten hottest pedals of September 2020. Click on the links below to read our coverage and video aggregation.

  1. (+5) TC Ditto Plus Looper
  2. (-1) Chase Bliss Preamp MK II Automatone
  3. (+1) Hologram Microcosm
  4. (New) Strymon Nightsky Reverb
  5. (New) Empress Zoia
  6. (New) Eventide Blackhole Reverb
  7. (New) Walrus Audio Julianna Chorus
  8. (-1) DSM & Humboldt Simplifier
  9. (-1) GFI Specular Tempus Reverb
  10. (-5) Poly Effects Digit/Beebo

(The numbers in parenthesis show the change in position from the previous month)

Check out the gallery below for brief descriptions about each pedal (mouse-over or first tap) and video demos (on click or second tap).

*The data is collected from our Google Search Console and Google Trends.