In praise of the humble boost pedal

[Lev]

I love it when an old piece of gear that you had previously discarded ends up being an essential part of your rig!!

About 2 years ago I purchased a Marshall Bluesbreaker II pedal - it sounded good when I played it in the store and it was pretty cheap so I took it home intending to use it for blues/overdrive sounds. After a week I absolutely hated the tone from it and put it back in it's box and forgot all about it.

Fast forward two years and I'm now playing in a 3 piece band. I had been playing with my guitar volume at about 7 and kicking it up to 10 for solos but I found for heavier songs the volume had crept up to 10 before the solo kicked in. I decided a clean boost pedal was the way to go, then I spotted the Bluesbreaker sitting boxed on my shelf and I remembered that it has a clean boost setting. So I took it to my rehearsal last week and it made such an amazing difference to my sound. I'm using the Danelectro Cool Cat Drive as my main OD pedal and now I kick in the BBII to boost my solos and it sounds amazing - my solos really stand out and sparkle.

I'm now loving this pedal that I had previously discarded!! :rockon:

[markb]

Funny, I'm using the CC Drive mostly as a dirty boost/rhythm OD with an SD-1 to soup things up for leads but I'm running my amp semi-distorted these days (I turn down for cleans). A lot of people seem to prefer the boost setting on the BBII to its drive. The older black Bluesbreaker pedals are great overdrives but I think the CC Drive is better.

[tot_Ou_tard]

My experience doesn't mean much, but I often use my Barber Launchpad. It is very clean with a lot of clean gain on tap.

[Robert]

Yeah it's cool to run multiple gain pedals. You can always use one just as a booster, or you can use a bit of gain on both for over the top stuff. Cool too.

[marnold]

The Stomp School column in the current Premier Guitar has a nice write-up on using a clean boost with another gain pedal.

[sunvalleylaw]

I really like my cheap little Berhinger PB100 preamp booster too. Sometimes, it gives the signal just that little bit of something extra!

[schenkadere]

I prefer an OD that is clean with the gain at 0...it's more versatile.