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Best New Pedals + Effects of 2025
From the Delightfully-Named Dobbo to the Most Mischievous of Pets
2025 had no shortage of new effect processors—from recreations of famously mis-used recording equipment to several pedals that aim to bring granular sampling capabilities to the hands (or feet) of new musicians. One pedal has a built-in FM radio; one transforms your sound by using it to drive an internal motor; and yet another begs the question: what if your multi-effect processor had a powerful, probability-laden sequencing system built right in?
Scope it out: these are Perfect Circuit / Signal staff picks for the best new effect processors and pedals of 2025.
Butterfly Effects Dobbo
We've seen a lot of granular modules and pedals in our years of purveying hip electronic music gear, so for one to make our end-of-year lists, even after all this time, is a special thing. For it to be the first product from an up-and-coming maker is even more special. But that's just what Butterfly Effects has achieved with the delightfully-named Dobbo.
Anyone who has designed their own granular synthesis processor, or even surveyed the many options available these days, will know that managing the breadth and depth of parameters is no easy feat. Unless you're working in software or an expansive hardware platform, much of the challenge is streamlining and consolidating parameters into useful ranges and groupings. We're pleased to say that Dobbo has managed to do this with deft and grace—in fact, it's hard to find settings on Dobbo that sound bad.
Dobbo's controls for Rate, Size, Mix, Time, Pitch, and Space will draw forth grains from the pedal's five-second audio buffer memory. For further variety in your microsounds, Dobbo features a modal Chance parameter, toggling between affecting the four parameters encircled by corresponding color rings. By introducing variable amounts of random deviation around the current position of the knob, Chance makes sure that you're always generating dynamic and lively granular effects.
Depending on your needs, Dobbo can generate grains freely or sync up with Tap Tempo or MIDI Clock. As such, Dobbo is a granular powerhouse that can slot into any pedalboard, studio, or electronic music rig.
Endorphin.es Evil Pet
Endorphin.es’ Evil Pet is a mischievous miniature processing & sampling powerhouse: an eight-voice granular sampler in effect pedal format. It chews up audio, turn it into a polyphonic synth, and can even pull in FM radio for some good old-fashioned chaos. True to its bright pink design, it’s playful, experimental, and a little unpredictable—in all the best ways.
Like many granular synthesis-oriented instruments, Evil Pet takes incoming audio and chops it into tiny grains that can be reshaped into shimmering pads, fractured textures, or complete sonic mayhem. Whether you’re feeding it a vocal sample, a guitar riff, or whatever’s coming through its built-in mic, Evil Pet handles it all with gleeful enthusiasm. And with stereo inputs, onboard sampling, and even a built-in FM radio tuner, you'll never be without a sound source to capture and transform.
Despite its proclivities toward unruly behavior, Evil Pet will prove to be a trustworthy companion, as well. Its front panel keeps everything clear and hands-on, with familiar granular controls like Position, Size, and Grains—giving you macro-level control for the texture and motion of the resulting sounds. Pitch offers ±2 octaves of range, and onboard MIDI support makes it simple to play or sequence polyphonically. Built-in effects let you dive into filter, reverb, and saturation for everything from lush ambience to digital grit. Modulation fans aren’t left out either—there’s a built-in ADSR envelope, three LFOs, and even a Random button that instantly reshuffles your parameters (except Mix and Volume), perfect for happy accidents and fresh ideas. Evil Pet even offers expressive MPE support—transcending its use as a processor and turning it into a deep tool for expressive sonic performance.
Packed with character yet easy enough to use right out the box, Evil Pet strikes a rare balance between depth and immediacy. Whether you’re dropping it on your desktop or adding it to a pedalboard, it’s a versatile little critter that invites experimentation, rewards curiosity, and keeps you on your toes.
Gamechanger Audio Motor Pedal
Gamechanger Audio’s Motor Pedal truly puts the "motor" in "pedal." It is exactly what its name promises: an electromechanical synth driven by an actual spinning motor—and by whatever instrument you feed into it. Whether you’re playing guitar, bass, or keys, the Motor Pedal translates your performance into pure mechanical motion, using a brushed DC motor as an oscillator. The result is an unconventional sound engine that reacts with uncanny accuracy to your playing dynamics, turning tonal nuance into living, breathing motion.
The pedal is a true sonic shapeshifter, offering five distinct sonic palettes: Motor, MxD, M-Wave, Coil, and Vocoder. Each of these has a distinctive sonic signature, from glitchy, overdriven harmonics to eerie, voice-like textures. It’s the kind of instrument that constantly surprises you—part synth, part effect, part kinetic sculpture.
Motor Pedal's dual signal paths let you blend clean and motorized tones to taste, while a tilt EQ and analog drive add everything from subtle warmth to all-out distortion. The onboard accelerator expression pedal is a marvel in itself—it can accelerate, brake, drift, glide, or clutch depending on the mode, giving you expressive control that feels physical in a way few pedals do. With options for vibrato, glide, and extended release, plus full MIDI and USB integration, it’s just as at home in a DAW setup as it is on a pedalboard.
Gamechanger Audio has built a reputation on turning wild ideas into serious instruments, and the Motor Pedal is easily among their most fun and outlandish creations yet.
JHS Pedals 424 Gain Stage
We may never know to what degree Brian Eno enjoys the sound of preeminent Los Angeles indie musicians like mk.gee, but JHS's 424 Gain Stage can't help but remind us of the ambient pioneer's oft-overcited quote: "Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature."
Anyone (and there are a lot of us) who've spent considerable time using the world's most legendary cassette 4-track recorders has likely had a unique relationship with their lovingly lo-fi character. Like a good friend who always seems to get you into trouble, the cassette 4-track is often at once a crucial companion in music making and a Sisyphean climb that leaves you, once again, cartwheeling helplessly down fidelity mountain after tempting too close to the apex of pro audio tone. And yet, without our cassette-based comrade in arms, countless musical memories simply wouldn't exist. As with all good friends, we learn to love their idiosyncrasies, warts and all, and develop an appreciation for those so-called flaws that's often hard to express to the unacquainted.
So finally, as Eno presaged, the 424's time has come to be reconsidered as—maybe good, actually? While other designs have existed to take one of the humble 4-track's uniquely wonky channel strips into a portable pedal format, JHS's 424 Gain Stage emerged in 2025 at just the right time. Likewise, the pedal-obsessed minds under Josh Scott's dutiful tutelage are uniquely primed to produce a rock solid rendition, so it's no surprise that yes, the 424 Gain Stage sounds really good.
Distilling each element of the original unit's channel strip into a compact, five-knob package, the 424 Gain Stage delivers a near perfect implementation of a vintage MKI unit. Near perfect, only in that you may have to rub yours in the dirt yourself if you find yourself missing the scratchy-knob sounds. Gain 2 delivers your channel fader, while Gain 1 offers that oh-so-important trim control, and Volume gives you access to the master fader. Using these three gain stages alone, you'll find a cornucopia of lo-fi direct-to-console tones that stretch from darkened boost to dimed-out distortion. The EQ controls are also onboard, offering a surprisingly flexible tone shaping duo of Treble and Bass knobs to give you even more tonal range.
Sure, you'll get it for the almost-goofy and all-the-way awesome blown out tones, but you'll keep it for its unique range and flexibility. Put it at the front of your chain as a characterful boost, put it in the middle to stack with other dirt effects, or blow your whole signal chain through it—all without having to figure out how much velcro to glue on your vintage 4-track. It also has an XLR output and ground lift, opening up a wide range of colorful options in the studio even for non guitarists. However you use it, the 424 Gain Stage from JHS is no mere oddity, nor is it all hype—just time tested 4-track tones, made more accessible for modern creatives.
Polyend MESS
MESS is a mercurial multi-effect pedal from Polyend that opens up a wide array of sounds that are distinct and unique, thanks largely to its implementation of a powerful 16 step sequencer. It's both satisfying and easy to set up a complex soundscape with just a few knob tweaks and a couple button presses on the sequencer buttons. The 4 tracks open up a world of 125 different stereo effects that all sound great and have parameters that can be addressed per step. This is perfect for using their Spectralizer effect to add sporadic glitch effects, their Micro Looper to add short repeated sections, or the Granular effects for moments of texture, all tempo synced.
MESS is also a very capable conventional multi-effect unit with a smattering of delay, reverb, modulation, and waveshaping algorithms. Best of all, if you want a little bit of excitement or movement, you can just engage the sequencer and tweak away. With the option for 4 tracks, you also have the opportunity to double, triple, or quadruple effects to create stacked delays or use the Pitch-shifter to create chords. These can become even more unique by adjusting the speed and steps of each track's sequencer allowing for dense polyrhythms or just simple chance operations to occur.
One of the most lovely things about the pedal has to be the lack of complicated menus and simple interface. The manual helps, but isn't needed to get going out-of-the-box. Organic and jarring movements are all easily dialed in, so no matter what your style is, MESS is there to both clean up and live up to its eponym.
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