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Bought a Boss DS-1

I just picked up one of the most famous distortion boxes ever made, the classic orange Boss DS-1 Distortion pedal, on eBay for $25 with an adaptor and original box/info. I’ve been looking on picking up a new distortion pedal for the last few month and this one was a good deal for a great, easy to modify pedal with tons of kits out there. I’ve played around with this pedal at guitar center and really do like it as it is. it has a good amount of range from a nice breaky grit to a metal lead sound, and playing with the tone knob and your pickups can really give you a ton of tones.

Boss DS-1
Boss DS-1

Is it the best I’ve heard, not by far, but it’s a pedal that you can always rely on and when it’s added to your pedal-board, you can really tweak up your sound. I’ve been running it with the overdrive at 6 o’clock so that its barely on and the tone at about 1 o’clock as a boost before my wah and Amp’s drive channel. I’ve haven’t been able to get a real heavy metal rhythm/low-end sound but cranking the Distortion knob and flipping to my bridge gives you good harmonics and clarity on solos.

The main reason I bought it was to be able to mod it and really work on my circuit skills without dropping a ton of cash on a boutique pedal. From what I’ve been reading, I think I’m going to swap out some of the pieces to change the tone up a bit and maybe get rid of some of the brightness. It’s only changing out a few capacitors and resistors and it can sound like a Marshall JCM800’s gain to  a deeper/metal sound, all for under $10. I’ll keep you posted.

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