WHY YOU NEED BOOST PEDALS
Okay, let’s go back a few years, to the early 2000s. This was when I first got into guitar pedals. At the time, I just happened to work in a music store, and I picked the brain of every employee there. My favorite go-to questions were: “What's your favorite distortion?” “What kind of delay do you use?” “What's your favorite overdrive?”
What can I say? I was a nerd who needed answers.
One guy dropped some wisdom that I didn’t understand until later in life. I asked him, “What overdrive do you use?” And he said, “Well, I don't really use overdrives.”
I’ll give you guys a second to wipe up the water you just spat out. Yup. He really said that. He said, “I just use different boosts pedals on my board.” And I remember thinking, “What? How does that work?” Years later I now understand there's something special about boost pedals and what they do.
So, to boost or not to boost, that is the question.**
**I think Shakespeare said that in the late ’60s. Yeah, just checked that. Wikipedia wouldn’t lie.
So, what is a boost pedal? Boost is one of the first forms of electric guitar tonal manipulation, which basically means “taking the guitar and changing how it sounds.” Let’s say you have a guitar and you want to make it louder. That’s when you need a boost. That boost goes after the guitar but before the amp, which is why sometimes you see a boost called a preamp. There's tons of different ways to label it, but at the end of the day, a boost is anything that makes your guitar sound louder than it really is.
How It Works
So where does this boost pedal come from? What situation or environment inspired the invention of a circuit we all know and most of us love? I have a theory.
Let's say you have a 15 watt tube amp and an 85 watt tube amp. Each of these amps represent a very different amount of headroom. The lower the wattage of an amp, the faster it will distort when you turn it up; it runs out of headroom. You can think of headroom as the amount of clean power that an amp can produce before naturally overdriving. The 15 watt amp doesn't have much headroom to offer; it will distort pretty quickly as you turn up the volume. Let’s also be clear: this is cool and very rock’n’roll! The 85 watt amp has way more headroom. Five times more! So, in theory, this amp will go five times louder than the 15 watt while staying crystal clear and precise.
Another factor that plays into headroom is the pickup of the guitar that you’re using. Let’s say you have a single coil pickup and you also have a Humbucker pickup. Now a Humbucker is simply two single coils wound together to prevent the hum that a single coil has. But in doing so, it becomes louder and more powerful. When I strum an E chord on my single coil, it creates a certain amount of voltage (volume) that usually stays below the threshold of that 15 watt amplifier. But when I strum the Humbucker equipped guitar through the same amp, it has more voltage and it crosses over the headroom threshold of the 15 watts. It pushes the amp into overdrive and proves something that I’ve known for years: loud is more good.
In the ’50s and ’60s they figured this out. Everyone figured it out. Louder is better because louder eventually distorts, and that created rock’n’roll. So it's safe to say that without boosting signal into a valve amp, we wouldn't have had overdrive and without overdrive would we have rock’n’roll? I don't think so.
Early History of Boost Pedals
Now, let's talk about some of the very, very early effects units in boost pedals. Because (let's be honest) the Humbucker pickup is not enough for the way some folks rock'n'roll. We need even louder. We need even more gain and even more push to the amp.
How could you achieve that? Two words: tape echo. You've probably seen pedals that advertise Echoplex preamp boost like the Maestro EP1, which came out in 1962. The deal is, if you take an Echoplex and you turn all the delay controls off, it has a volume control, and that volume control offers a ton of gain and is an amazing preamp. The more you know.
When I first met Ryan Adams, he was touring everywhere with his pedal board, but he had an old Shin-Ei Japanese tape echo unit and he set it right in front of the board, turned all the delay off, turned it up just a little over unity gain, and it made his whole signal sound better. It acted like a buffer enhancer for him. A lot of people have done that over the years, and a lot of rigs rely on a tape echo that's cranked a little bit. A guy that comes to mind is Brian Setzer.
Not long after, we got the 1966 Dallas Rangemaster Treble Booster. Now when I first heard of this pedal, I remember thinking, Why would I ever want to boost the treble of anything? Well, I didn't understand this was invented in the ’60s in a place called London. You may have heard of it. The Brits rock a little differently than Americans. They played darker British amps like Vox and Marshall, and they wanted to hit them in a certain way so they saturated a little brighter, but not too much.
Over in America we had the spanky Twin Reverb everywhere, but the Brits didn't want that. They did want a little more clarity, a little brightness to cut through the mix. Enter the treble booster, which boosted the mid frequencies and the high mids and gave these really crazy cool, complex harmonics to the signal.
Go listen to “We Will Rock You” by Queen and Brian May's guitar solo is this. Pretty much any Queen song is this. His rig consisted of his homemade guitar plugged into a Rangemaster that sat on top of his Vox AC30 Amplifier, and it sounded heavenly. Guys like early Clapton, Jeff Beck, and even modern players like Taylor from Dawes (one of my favorite guitar players with immaculate tones) rely on a Rangemaster. There's nothing harsh about this at all. It's perfect in every way,** and you've heard it your whole life. You just may not realize it.
**Basically the Mary Poppins of boost pedals.
Later that same year we got a new idea: let's create a piece of gear that plugs straight into the guitar, and then take that cable that normally goes into the guitar and plug it into the amp. The end result? You have a volume control boost on your guitar instead of a big ol’ pedal board. This is for musicians who just want to rock and it’s a really great solution. Dan Armstrong, Vox, Electro Harmonix, and a lot of other companies made products like this.
One format for the “jack boost” was the Electro Harmonix LPB, which came out in 1967. It actually predates the Big Muff of 1969 and, in my opinion, Electro Harmonix doesn't get enough credit for it because what this boost did for guitar and for pedals is a big flippin’ deal. Legend has it that Peavey “borrowed” this circuit inside their amps in the early days to create distortion!
You had a few different versions: the LPB-1 and LPB-2, but the only real difference between them was that the LPB-2 version had a stomp switch and was in a big box. Basically, this boost takes your signal and simply turns it up louder. It doesn't emphasize the treble, like the treble booster, and it doesn't emphasize mids. It simply takes what you have and cranks it up cleanly. The LPB boost circuit is elemental to boost. It's elemental to guitar. It's elemental to the boutique guitar industry because so many boutique boost pedals are based around the LPB-1.
Pre Boost VS Post Boost
One common thing I've heard over the years is guitar players telling me that their friends have a boost, their favorite artists use a certain boost, and when they try to put it in their rig it just doesn't feel right. It doesn't sound right. It's not as usable as they thought it would be.
I think the reason for that is people don't understand the concept of pre and post boost properly.
Let's say you have a Morning Glory and you love it; it's the best low gain overdrive on the planet.** You love everything about it. You just wish it got a little dirtier. You don't want crazy distortion, you just want to add a little more grit than it already has. Take a boost and put it ‘pre’, meaning before the drive. This basically means you have your favorite drive at the settings you love and you then place a boost in front of it. Turn the boost on and it becomes kind of an additional overdrive control that never existed, you can now ovrdrive your favorite overdrive!
**You said it, not me.
Now let's say you have your Morning Glory, you love the sound, you love the pedal, you wish you could marry it**, but you want to make it louder. Maybe you want to make your whole rig just a little louder for solos or certain quieter parts. Put the boost ‘post’, or after. That will take the sound that you have and simply amplify it louder. So ‘post’ boost is the same sound you have, just louder. ‘Pre’ boost is the sound you have with a little more grit.
**I’ll be honest, I’m flattered you think so highly of my pedal, but this is getting a little weird.
My Favorite Boosts
If you want to hear more about my favorite boost pedals from other brands, check out my JHS Show episode on boost pedals. In the meantime, let me walk you through the JHS offerings on boost. The very first boost I ever released was the Mr. Magic. It's a one knob boost. You can leave it on as an enhancer or you can hit your amp and create distortion.
The version two of that is the Prestige. A lot of people don't realize it is really similar, but it's built to be an “always on” boost that you can crank up and create overdrive. My good friend Brad Jackson actually runs two of these together and makes overdrive with the boost.
The Mini Bomb Boost is a little bit dirtier. It was intended just for guitar solos so the high end of it's crispy, not so clear. Sad to say, these aren't made anymore, but Jared Sharp from SNL still uses this. I believe it's been on his board for a long, long time.
Another discontinued pedal is the Banana Boost. This guy played with the idea of blending full ranged treble, like the Silver Solo or the Moonshot. People have done that for years, and this was my take on it. My favorite feature was that it could be a full range boost, a treble boost, and anything in between.
We have the Haunting Mids. This was a limited edition Halloween thing that we put out for limited release, but we later released it as a normal product. The Haunting Mids is focused solely on the mid frequencies, so volume, mids, and you can sweep the mids and then you have a high low toggle. It's super cool to push only the mids when you get into pushing distorted amps, other distortions, scooping mids out. You can create all kinds of cool things!
Then we have the Milkman, which is a boost/preamp and slap echo. Basically, a tape delay style preamp section was used and then I added it into a circuit with a nice slap echo effect. It’s very similar to other pedals, like an Xotic EP booster where it feels and reacts like an echo units preamp. This just slaps on a slap delay.** And if you're a tele-player or a pedal steel enthusiast, this is a dream come true.
**I’m aware that I enjoy these puns more than anyone else ever does. I’m okay with that.
For the penultimate pedal, you have the Andy Timmons Plus. Basically, Andy has forever slammed his drive pedals with a boost and that's what you have here. You have the Andy Timmons signature distortion, and then you can slam it with a boost and create even more distortion. Maybe too much distortion? ...Nah. No such thing.
Last but not least, it's an overdrive and a boost with an order to toggle: the Ruby Red.
Okay, boost is a bigger topic than I can fully explain in one article, but I hope that I answered the question ‘to boost or not to boost’ with a resounding yes. Now that you've seen how boost works, how to apply it to your amps and guitars and different pedals, you have something else in your guitar player toolbox to create cool tones and have fun.