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Most of you should have seen by now my ’Yellow Means OverDrive’ (9) feature which covers off all of Boss’s Yellow OverDrives, and more recently I did a piece on ’Boss’s High Gain and Metal Distortion Pedals’ (9) - so this article covers all those remaining Boss Drive and Distortion Pedals (13) (past and present) which exist between those two extremes.

This article is written with a view towards the forthcoming OD-200 Hybrid Drive Workstation which in...

In advance of the arrival of the OD-200 I thought it would be good to do an overview of Boss’s own various Drive and Distortion pedals. In my recent ’Yellow Means OverDrive’ feature I covered off all of those particular Boss pedals, so this article is at the other end of the scale of gain - the High Gain and Metal Distortions. I will then follow up with a 3rd article covering those drives and distortions that sit between these and the 9 OverDrive pedals covered already.

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Anyone who’s read this blog will be very aware that I’m a fan of the Boss Katana amps - I’ve had the now series 1 KT-100 since it first came out as my left-hand amp in my stereo rig, and had already decided that I would be transitioning to the Katana Artist - with its better speaker and it’s various included extras - amongst them the forward-facing control panel.

Now the MKII range has come out and it has in effect frog-leaped over the Artist in terms of overall...

An exercise which began in 2015 with the launch of the DD-500 Digital Delay Workstation is finally complete, as hot on the heels of the recent medium-enclosure DD-200, we see a significantly updated DD-3T and brand new DD-8 - replacing their predecessors introduced in 1986 and 2008 respectively.

The DD-3T gains Tap Tempo capabilities with additional jack for external tap-tempo switch, and former ’Hold’ Mode is replaced with ’Short Loop’. The Direct Out socket ...

Another bonus round for the ’Pedal Primary Colour Wheel’ series - I kind of knew I would likely do this at some stage - the Boss Sky Blue influence on the Chorus format. Interestingly the original Choruses from Boss and MXR were somewhat dull grey boxes, and it wasn’t really until Boss’s CE-3 that the colour was properly locked down - the blue of the first CE-2 was typically a little paler and less saturated than the hue we’ve all become so familiar with now - or ...

We all knew that the OD-200 was going to be a killer Boost/OverDrive/Distortion pedal - but Boss has managed to surprise those of us who thought we had it figured out. We weren’t initially totally sure how the Parameters and Boost options were going to work - I already really love the versatility and adaptability of my Jackson Audio Broken Arrow - which encompasses 4 Drive Types alongside 4 Boost Types. Yet Boss ups the ante on that somewhat exponentially.

I thought the core of ...

Bonus Round! I hadn’t initially intended to do a Blue colourway feature off the back of my ’Pedal Primary Colour Wheel’ article, as I thought the exercise might turn out to be a little more tricky than the Red, Orange, Yellow and Green. Yet I’ve kind of been ’in the zone’ with these different colourways so I kind of proceeded on down that road.

I was right in that it took more research for Blue Pedals to find those that matched my criteria - and I ...

I initially decided that I was going to do 3 articles derived from my ’Pedal Primary Colour Wheel’ feature - but I’ve ended up with a 4th bonus one which sits nicely here in the sequence. In reviewing the Yellow colourway - and although I identified different hues of that representing Amber/Mustard in terms of T-Rex’s Mudhoney, and the pale yellow of Diamond Pedals’ Compressor - the overwhelming preponderance of Yellow just happens to be Boss’s many Over ...

This post is inspired by the recent launches of the Hotone Omni AC and Mooer Tone Capture Pedals. Before that, the long-standing champions of Acoustic Simulation were the Boss AC-3 and smaller Mooer replica - the Acoustikar. While SIM1’s slightly pricey XT-1 is a sort of more elaborate version of Tone Capture - coming with several high quality presets onboard by default.

Each of these pedals does things slightly differently - although there are degrees of overlap for some of ...

Update! This feature inspired 7 further articles - Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Sky Blue and Purple.

This feature was inspired by a couple of different events - firstly ongoing conversations I have been having with Fjord Fuzz’s Daniel Thornhill about the colour of LEDs for different pedal types, and secondly an odd Q&A episode of That Pedal Show where Dan was trying to match a pedal to the colour of his yellow trousers or pants as some of you like to call them.

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