BUILD A BOOSTER!!!

[Dragonfly]

With that said, one Booster that is still overlooked time and time again is the Gus Smalley Boost AKA "the beginner project".

AKA my most used clean boost (and I've built more than a few boosts.....though if were going for a lightly dirty boost, I prefer a simple jfet booster with a bypass cap on the source and gain control shunting that cap to ground)

hmmmm.....sounds familiar ... 

Not to de rail the thread completely, but I was just playing around with one of those and I decided to change the gain pot from linear to reverse log taper- much  better. Better control over the gain range now. One of the few DIY pedals that I built that made it onto the pedalboard on day 1 and has never come off since.

yep...i use a 5k reverse on mine....

amazingly useful, these little boosters are. great "building blocks" too...

[96ecss]

A buddy of mine asked me to mod his TS808 to make it sound better. I asked him how he was using it. He said "Drive down, Volume up and Tone about 9:00". That meant he was using it as a booster, not for OD. I went to his house and brought my Mosfet Booster with me. I said before I mod your 808, lets try this. I put it on his pedalboard and turned it on. He hasn't turned it off since. I had to build him one just to get mine back.

Dave

[demonstar]

Another thing I found was that try several transistors don't just settle for the first one. I've started measuring forward voltages of diodes too now. I just built a JFET matcher yesterday to match J201s for my phase 45 I'm about to build and it shocked me how much they actually vary. I think I've got my layout sorted and just about ready to go. I just need to get a new soldering iron tip(this one is 35 year old, rusty, cracked and is huge.). If things are in sockets it's dead easy to swap them in and out. I have only ever used the booster I've built but I'm getting vibes that they're a very personal thing and I have a feeling every booster responds to different guitars and amps differently and some will like one and others will like another. So experimentation is probably the word. 

[markm]

Just so ya know,
There's a Booster in this month's FX-X !