WHY BBE PEDALS ARE AMAZING
Picture it. The year is 2006. Google buys YouTube for $1.65 billion. NASA sends the New Horizons space probe to Pluto, because why not? Nintendo releases the Wii console, and from that moment on Mario Kart gets really, really fun. Also, BBE releases a line of pedals that I think are severely underappreciated, and today I'm going to make you appreciate them.**
**Not, like, in an aggressive way. You can make your own choices here. We’re all adults. I just mean, if I do my job right, you will love them as much as I do when this is finished. Or else.
BBE stands for Barcus-Berry Electronics. These guys have been around for a long time. They're primarily well-known in the pro audio world for a famous rack unit called the Sonic Maximizer. In the late 1980s, they dabbled with some guitar products like the BBE Stinger Pedal. But I want to pick up the story in 2006 when they released this entire full line of guitar effects ranging from compression all the way to fuzz.
It’s no exaggeration to say that they're quite dear to my heart. And after this, I think they'll be dear to you as well. So let’s go through these bad boys one by one.
Orange Squash
First up is my absolute favorite: the Orange Squash. Spoiler: I'll probably say each of these pedals are my favorite because they're that good. But really, the Orange Squash knocked it out of the park. It's based around the old Dan Armstrong Orange Squeezer.
Some of you who are familiar with my JHS pedal line are probably thinking, “Josh, didn’t YOU do a pedal around the Orange Squeezer, too?”
Yes, I did. I was honestly inspired by the Orange Squash as much as the original unit, since the Orange Squash was one of the first compressors that ever stayed on my board for a significant amount of time. When I got into modding and building old classic circuits, I hunted this up and took my own attempt at tweaking the circuit. I have to give them some credit for that. The Orange Squash and the Orange Squeezer both sound amazing.
There's also a little bit of a conspiracy here. You ready? Get your popcorn and get comfortable, because this is about to get good. I’m talking about the Main Squeeze. When BBE first released the Orange Squash, they promoted it as the Main Squeeze, and there are still a few units on the used market with the original name. I’m proud to say that I own one of those pedals. I have kept it in the original box in the plastic, because I don't want to touch it, because it's pretty dang rare. Long story short, when BBE released the ‘Main Squeeze’ pedal, Digitech dropped a letter on them because they already had a pedal called the Main Squeeze. Thus, their pedal was reborn as the Orange Squash.
That's as big as this conspiracy gets, but to me any conspiracy is worth talking about.**
**Dan Brown, if you’re reading this, I’ve got the plot for your next thriller ready to go. Working title: The Main Squeeze Enigma.
Green Screamer
Next up is a fantastic overdrive called the BBE Green Screamer. I bet you can't guess what it's based on--wait a second, you just did. It's a Tube Screamer.
It's really nice and it has some really, really great tweaks. I think it has a little more gain to it and the tone control is way more usable. Basically, this is a great drive pedal. I'm not going to shoot them out because there's no point here. All of these pedals have really nice adjustments that make them not a direct clone of anything, so we're not going to waste our time there.
Just do yourself a solid, pull up a demo, and listen to it as it is.
The Sonic Stomp Sonic Maximizer
The Sonic Stomp Sonic Maximizer is a two knob pedal version of their famous rack mount unit. What it does is a bit mysterious, but they say that it adds clarity, brings some depth, and it fixes phase issues in your signal path.
I’ll be honest: I make pedals for a living, and even I'm not sure exactly what it does. I've never studied the circuit, but I do know that I really like it. I used to run it at the end of my pedalboard as an always-on, more better device, but I've seen a lot of people put it after high gain drive pedals specifically to make them sound great no matter where the settings are.
Frequency Boost
Next up is the Frequency Boost one-knob boost pedal. This isn't your typical, clean boost pedal. It’s based around the 1966 Dallas Rangemaster, which many of you know I am a huge fan of. The biggest difference in these is that the Rangemaster is $4,000 and the Frequency Boost is $29 on Reverb. Let me do the math on that real quick. Yeah, looks like there’s a slight savings if you go with the BBE pedal, if you’re into that kind of thing.
There’s another big difference that's really impressive to me. While the old Rangemaster and other variants of this pedal use a transistor (and sometimes a very hard to find germanium version of the transistor) which is finicky, BBE said no to all of that and they use an op-amp instead. The op-amp is really consistent and, truly, all of these op-amps sound identical.
To my knowledge, this may be the only treble boost variant pedal that just uses an op-amp, which is especially cool because it sounds fantastic.
Boosta Grande
Next up is their full range boost called the Boosta Grande. Now this is a single op-amp non-inverting circuit, much like the Micro Amp. But it's not like they simply cloned a micro amp, because (let’s be real) there's only so much you can do with a single op-amp. They do it really well with the Boosta Grande. This is a powerful piece of gear. It keeps all your low end intact, plus it’s mega, mega loud if you start turning it up.
Plus it’s a beautiful pedal to look at. I really like this blue color. To paraphrase a popular meme, “Get you a pedal that can do both.”
The Opto Stomp
Next is another compressor: the Opto Stomp. Yep, BBE is a pedal company that has two boosts and two compressors, and that's impressive to me.
The Opto Stomp is very, very different from the Orange Squash. First off, the Opto Stomp is an optical compressor, whereas the Orange Squash is a FET-based compressor. The Opto Stomp actually uses a Vactrol and light detection to turn the compression element on and off. It has a pad for negative 15 to 0. I would say that this is a very pro audio studio-style circuit. It doesn't feel like anything I've ever seen in the guitar pedal market and it's really, really unique.
I like it for a lot of reasons, but the best way you can really get a feel for this is to look up a demo video. It’s okay. I’ll wait.
The Crusher
I’m bringing up the Crusher by BBE because this is a BBE episode, but moving past that, it's very important that you know how good this pedal is. It simulates a high gain Marshall stack sound and it does it really, really well. To the point that it kind of blows my mind when you stack it up against pedals that cost four or five times what the Crusher goes for used on Reverb.
Now it comes with its own conspiracy. Unless you jumped into the article in the middle for some reason (in which case, welcome!), you know that we already had one conspiracy with the Orange Compressor, which means that we’re about to tackle a second conspiracy theory. With the same pedal company. In the same year.** I want you to know that this is a big deal for pedals. It's a big deal for our nation. It's a big deal for our planet Earth. You heard it first here.
**Dan Brown, if you’re still reading, I’ve got the sequel to The Main Squeeze Enigma ready for you. Working title: The Crusher Conundrum.
Let me tell you the story. Paul Gagan is the designer of this circuit. Now, he designed stuff for Fender, Charvel Jackson, and when working at Jackson in the mid-’80s he was messing around building pedal circuits. He would put them in little DIY closures and hand them out to famous bands as they came through the Jackson factory. Now this circuit, he says he designed in ’84, ’85 and was handing it out at that time, and then they released it at BBE in 2006. But keep ’85 in your mind because that's important.
We have the Marshall Governor coming in ‘88, which is an entirely different pedal made in England. Here’s the conspiracy: these circuits are identical. The circuit's the same, the sound's the same, and it's honestly kind of creepy. It's kind of X-Files. What's going on here? Paul Gagan says he designed it in ’85, was giving them away, and then Marshall releases the same exact circuit under the Governor, which is the sound of a stacked high gain Marshall, in ’88?
I don't know who came first and honestly, I don't care. I just love pedals and I want you to love pedals.
Free Fuzz
Last but definitely not least is my favorite BBE pedal: the Free Fuzz. I know I said the Orange Squash was my favorite, and I stand by that. I’m going to coin a phrase here, which I think will be the new “radical”: this one's “a lot of my favorite.”
I have my Free Fuzz in the original box, because I’m a huge nerd about these original boxes and manuals and stickers from 2006. This is a ’70s inspired silicon fuzz with a little clever biasing trick. Now the ’70s fuzzes are really expensive and we see people like Mike Fuller of Fulltone release pedals around this as well. But the Free Fuzz does away with the typical fuzz control that you'd see on a fuzz pedal, and they use the fuzz knob as a bias technique that's really, really unique to this. What's crazy about it is how it holds its own as a distortion pedal and it does the nice fuzz textures.
It loves the neck pickup and it cleans up really well with the volume control. The best part? It's astronomically, unbelievably affordable. I’m talking about $70 used.
Post 2006 BBE Pedals
They're also known for the BBE Wah, which came out later. It's based around the Italian Vox Wah, and it is magnificent. When it comes to Wah pedals, it's crazy how well this is made for the price. I used mine for years and years.
They have some new pedals and new designs that obviously aren't from or have anything to do with the 2006 series I showed you today. I really love the Two Timer Delay and the Mind Bender Chorus Vibrato, which is a really clever take on the BOSS CE-2 analog. One of my favorites is the 427 Distortion. Out of all the BBE pedals, this is for real, my absolute favorite distortion pedal they have. It's based around the Rat topology and it's great. Thick fuzz, cutting distortion, and it even does some nicer clean tones. You can’t beat this.
I want to give a few other points here about this 2006 line. They're in all-metal enclosures, true bypass switching, and the circuitry inside is mainly all through whole parts and really high end stuff. These are on par with anything from the 2000s that was coined boutique. I just can't say enough about going and trying these out. A lot of the pedals I talked about in this article have new branding or may be in a smaller enclosure, but they're all exceptional and they have the same build quality.
With that said, go check out all these BBE pedals. They are fantastic.