The 5 best and the 5 worst MXR pedals.

One knob, four stages, 1974. The script version is smoother because it lacks the feedback resistor the block logo era added; the block barks harder in the mids and shoves your amp around. Eddie Van Halen put a script Phase 90 in front of a Marshall on the first Van Halen record and turned a subtle studio effect into a lead voice. Fifty years on, the standard unit is about $100 street, the script reissue about $130, and there is no phaser under $300 I would take over the script. Speed at nine o'clock. Leave it on.

Launched in 2008: 600 milliseconds of bucket brigade delay with the best-judged voicing in the category. The repeats are dark enough to sit behind the note instead of arguing with it, and the Mod switch adds a slow wobble that reads as tape without the cosplay. I have owned three since 2012, sold two in board purges, and replaced both inside a year. That is not churn; that is a utility bill. About $170 street. The Deluxe adds tap tempo. Most rooms do not care.

Two knobs around an OTA circuit, the CA3080 chip in the vintage-spec script reissue, and no interest in transparency. The Dyna Comp darkens your tone, pumps when you dig in, and flattens a Telecaster into the exact shape that fit between a pedal steel and a radio compressor for twenty years of country records. It is not a utility compressor; it is an effect, the way a fuzz is an effect. About $100 street. If you want polite, buy a Wampler Ego. If you want the sound, there is one box.

The Timmy spent two decades as the transparent overdrive you waited on, hand-built by one man at one bench. The MXR mini is the real circuit with Cochrane's name on the box and a three-way clipping toggle, for about $130 street. It does the one thing no marketing department has ever faked: your amp, slightly angrier, with the lows and highs still where you left them. In a market of $250 transparent boutique clones, the real thing costs half. That should embarrass somebody.

Analog Man's King of Tone has a waitlist measured in years, and the years are not a rumor. The Duke of Tone is the Prince of Tone circuit, the single-channel version, built by Dunlop with Mike Piera's sign-off: boost, overdrive, and distortion modes on a toggle, about $150 street, in stock everywhere. It is not the full two-channel King and it does not pretend to be. It is the half of the King people actually use. The Duke answers the only question that matters: no, you did not need to wait.

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The Blue Box drops your signal two octaves through a fuzz, and the tracking holds together only if you play single notes up the neck with the tone rolled back. Jimmy Page used one on the Fool in the Rain solo, and that solo has sold every Blue Box since. You will buy it for that reason, find the sound in one afternoon, and never step on it again. Lo (lo.flannery) keeps hers on a shelf above the board, not on it. She calls it her favorite pedal she never plays. That is the correct relationship with a Blue Box.

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MXR called it the Clone Looper, and the name is the most accurate spec on the sheet. It arrived in 2019 into a market the TC Electronic Ditto had owned for six years at about $100, and its answer was more footswitches, a playback-speed party trick you will use twice at the store, and a price around $150. The Boss RC-1 gives you a visual loop display for less. Loopers are trust machines; on a dark stage the only feature that matters is knowing where the loop is. The Clone Looper never made me trust it.

The EVH's two exclusive features are the script/block switch and the Frankenstein finish, and only one of them passes audio. The standard Phase 90 runs about $100 street, the script reissue about $130, the EVH about $170. Eddie's phaser sound was a script Phase 90 into a Marshall on the edge of collapse; the stripes were on the guitar, and the pedal does not ship with the Marshall. If you truly need both voicings in one box, this is the only way to get them, and that is the one honest sentence in its favor. The rest is merchandise.

Randy Rhoads ran a Distortion+ into a cranked Marshall and made it immortal, and every kid since who has plugged one into a clean amp at bedroom volume has met the truth: the pedal was seasoning, not the meal. Germanium diodes clipping to ground after a single op-amp stage, thin up high, fizzy into anything Fender-clean. About $80 street, which is cheap, and still the wrong buy when a used Super Badass does everything this circuit wanted to do. Own one to understand 1981. Do not gig it in 2026.

I have owned a Sugar Drive twice, and the second purchase is the review: I forgot the first one. It is a Klon-style mini with a switchable buffer, it does the mid bump, it stacks fine, it commits no crimes. But the Soul Food had already done the accessible klone for about $80 street years earlier, and the Tumnus had done it smaller and better. The Sugar Drive exists because the catalog had a Klon-shaped hole. Then MXR started shipping the Timmy and the Duke, and the case for the in-house klone went to zero.