My wife surprised me with the Boss DS-1 last night. I'm really impressed. This is my first pedal and I think it's a great way to start out. Being able to switch from clean to crunch is adding an extra layer to my playing now, but what I learned last night after just wailing on my guitar was it really juiced up my sustain.

Again, I'm a super amateur, I've never had a lick of musical education before I decided I wanted to learn how to play guitar a few years ago and I never wanted to throw too much money into it. My setup is a Epi LP standard played throug a Peavey Vyprr 15 (gonna post a thread about my next amp in a min). The Vyprr is a modelling amp and while I've been happy with it, it's versatile and it's let me learn where I like to be tonally, but it hasn't let me learn anything about shaping the sound. Yes there are tone and gain knobs, but I don't use them because it messes up my defaults and I can just switch the amp style and get a sound close enough to what I'm looking for anyway. With this pedal I can really change things around on my distortion channel anyway.

But wow, the crunch this thing gives, it's fully toned. I don't know how to speak the language but it's like a fuller, cleaner distortion than anything I could get out of my amp. I love how the tone really shines through and like I said, the sustain is super long when I play through this pedal too. It doesn't seem to change the clean channel at all either, which is something I saw a really cheap distortion pedal do.

I'm really happy with this. Looks like a hell of a quality pedal too. It's a little tank box.

As for the music, I'm working on Dani California lately and this pedal came at a perfect time.