Near the end of each year, we like to pause as it draws to a close to take stock of the year's best-selling music gear.
The pedals list below begin with the Top 10 best-selling pedals released in 2023 (that is, pedals that were available for the first time this year, excluding those that were exclusive-to-Reverb or that benefitted from exclusive promotions on our site).
From there, we look at the overall pedal market (new and used), and break out the top-selling pedals in brand new condition in 2023.
As always, these lists exclude items that were exclusively for sale on Reverb, on sale for exclusive-to-Reverb prices, or otherwise benefitted from exclusive promotions on our site. Find all of the year's best-selling gear lists: guitars, electronic gear, and recording equipment.
Note: All rankings are determined by total order count—that is, the actual number of items sold, not the total price of sold items.
Key takeaways
- Strymon's Cloudburst is an ambient reverb pedal that gives players an expert collection of sounds from the company's larger BigSky Reverb. It was, by a good margin, the top-selling new-to-2023 pedal and (as you'll see below) the best-selling new-condition pedal from any year.
- While we withhold sales from products that were exclusive to Reverb, we do want to note a number of popular exclusives and launches we partnered on this year, including: the entire Blacked Out pedal series, the Shields Blender Limited-Edition, Eventide's H90 Harmonizer, EQD's Disaster Transport Delay Legacy Reissue, Alex Lifeson's Lerxst By-Tor, and Friedman's IR-X Dual Tube Preamp.
Key takeaways
- Last year, it seemed like a whole new audience of players got introduced to the Hologram Electronics Microcosm, which was originally released in 2020. In our 2022 overall list, it clinched the top spot, while this year, it fell back to just about where it was in 2021.
- While Strymon's new Cloudburst brings some BigSky settings to a smaller format pedal, the older sibling, the BigSky, is still well-represented in our rankings here.
- While the tried-and-true TS9 Tubescreamer remains on 2023's best-sellers list, EQD's Tubescreamer-style Plumes just barely dropped off of it this year.
Key takeaways
- Convenience and size dominate the best-selling amps list, with portable, lightweight, and digital-sound-packed options from Positive Grid, Boss, Yamaha, and Fender edging out more traditionally minded or full-sized amplifiers.
- Fender's Tone Master Deluxe Reverb—a full-sized digital emulation of its black-panel Deluxe Reverb tube amp—outsold its tube counterpart for the third year in a row. (For those counting, that's every year since the Tone Master's release.)
- In fact, the '65 Deluxe Reverb Reissue, which has been one of Fender's most popular amps throughout Reverb's 10-year life-span, failed to make it onto the Top 20 amps list at all this year, though it wasn't far from it. (Perhaps the popularity of UAFX's Dream '65 had a little something to do with that too...)