why are boss pedals so complicated?

[jamiefbolton]

This really intrigues me. I mean, take the Blues Driver for example. Its a good sounding pedal. Not the best, but good. Why make it so complicated? There are many pedals out there that are better sounding and a lot simpler.

I know the boss circuits are really old, but anybody have any insight?

[petemoore]

  Less expensive and more reliable switching ? [ alot of the circuit 'extra' is involved in switching, a SPST momentary the way it's installed is very reliable.
  The Audio circuit is similar to the tubescreamer, no ?
  For DIY BDriver, using a 3PDT for bypass switching simplifies the build.

[Ronsonic]

We build pedals for ourselves and other geeks. Roland builds pedals for everyone. More versatility is required, they can't sell a stripped down hot rod. For us it's less expensive to just wire in a 3PDT, for them all those parts and a tact switch make sense. It also means no pops ever which goes along with that "pedals for everyone" thing.

[ViolenceOnTheRadio]

I wonder this same thing about EVERY commercial pedal builder!

You see these schematics and think holy turds why would anyone have such involved architecture, especially after hearing the superiority of the DIY circuits everyone is building which are usually pretty straight forward designs that don't involve 1,000+ parts.

Could it be the engineers are going by data rather than their ears and simply aren't as much musicians as they are electronics specialists.......

I guess one of the primary factors is, most commercial pedals use active filter systems between their stage cascades and, active filters for their EQ's. That adds quite the mess to the circuit.

[greaser_au]

Remember that in a mass-production environment the main driver is *cost*. Parts have a non-zero cost (even if they are fractions of a cent for passives), so you can rest assured that if a part is present, it is has a  very good reason for being there.

An example of a use of an 'apparently superfluous' component is ensure stability or consistency across the range of tolerances of other components in the circuit. What costs more than components?  Human time! the minutes or hours that are spent by expensive skilled people troubleshooting the percentage of units that have all the unlucky combinations of tolerances far outweighs the cost of the few extra bits that will ensure the circuit works every time.

Even then as they only cost a few dollars per board, there will always be some that are just binned as 'beyond economical repair' before they even make it near an enclosure.

david

[Gus]

Boss circuit are not that complicated.
Plus they work, and don't break to often, and switch better than DPDT switches as the years go on.  Don't forget except for DSP based effects most guitar distortions are simple circuits.
A company is not going to use anymore parts that needed.  That can be defined by a set of rules for the design.
DIY sound better?  I don't know about that. I know pro players that use off the shelf BOSS and other company effects.  Some of the small builder stuff broke down that one person bought and this was a respected name.  The player takes care of their equipment.  I replaced a number of DPDP etc switches to "repair" the effects.   DIY works better?

DIY issues
Often used at home.  This means it might/will sound bad at stage volume  
Small toggle used  They will break off on the road
DPDT switches used instead of JFET etc they will break on the road
DIY die cast cases can break if the switch is in the wrong place and/or a person stomps on the switch and/or weighs a bit.

Better sounding is a TASTE issue

Lets take the BOSS SD1.  IMO a very good distortion at STAGE volume stock.  What is extra inside the box?

[Thomeeque]

Boss BD-2 Blues Driver actually *is* relatively complicated and unique overdrive (compared to TS family) even when you remove switching T.

[R.G.]

And we have a winner! David, come on down!

Remember that in a mass-production environment the main driver is *cost*. Parts have a non-zero cost (even if they are fractions of a cent for passives), so you can rest assured that if a part is present, it is has a  very good reason for being there.

An example of a use of an 'apparently superfluous' component is ensure stability or consistency across the range of tolerances of other components in the circuit. What costs more than components?  Human time! the minutes or hours that are spent by expensive skilled people troubleshooting the percentage of units that have all the unlucky combinations of tolerances far outweighs the cost of the few extra bits that will ensure the circuit works every time.

Those of you who haven't yet might want to read "What are all those parts for?" at GEO. The simple answer is that they're there to get (a) consistency in the face of tolerances and (b) long term reliability; at least to the end of the warranty period. Consistency is to be valued much more than a small percentage of amazing products. Having every unit perform as well as every other one is extremely valuable.

And a lot of things go into what I call making a circuit "play well with others".  You want to be sure that no pot/switch setting produce shrieking oscillation or dropouts. You want to be sure that simple things like opening the case doesn't produce the possibility of circuit damage. You want to be sure that you don't put controls or settings on there that could cause inadvertent nastiness for a slightly-drunk musician in front of several hundred or thousand people. You want to be sure that when the bass player plugs his speaker cable into the pedal input, the pedal is not destroyed. Think of every possible way the pedal will be misused. You can be sure that at least one of your customers will do that.

All of these things can be removed from a DIY pedal to make it simpler. That may be a good thing because while there are some really good practitioners in the DIY world, the majority of DIYers are still learning to solder, learning where to buy parts, learning where the wires go, learning which way round a polarized capacitor goes. For these folks, the simplicity is good; I'm relatively certain that went into shaping the original poster's comment.

Albert Einstein said "everything should be as simple as possible, but no simpler". Commercial pedals are more complex because they have to do more and different things than DIY pedals.

[DougH]

DIY issues
Often used at home.  This means it might/will sound bad at stage volume  
Small toggle used  They will break off on the road
DPDT switches used instead of JFET etc they will break on the road
DIY die cast cases can break if the switch is in the wrong place and/or a person stomps on the switch and/or weighs a bit.

Better sounding is a TASTE issue

Lets take the BOSS SD1.  IMO a very good distortion at STAGE volume stock.  What is extra inside the box?

I have the luxury of being able to play at stage volume at home. I also hear what my stuff sounds like in a "mix"- either through recording, an occasional gig, or jamming with my son (on bass) and a drum machine (at stage volume).

What I have found is that I gravitate towards pretty simple stuff, if I use pedals at all. For distortion I tend to use the Tone Source (Brown Source derivative), Rangemaster, and a commercial off the shelf TS9. For fuzz I'll use different things- I just used the Hot Silicon on a track and it worked really well.

Overall though I don't really use a lot of distortion pedals. And I have found the "amp emulator" pedals, for me, sounded good through a SS amp at low bedroom volume. But at stage volume the simple things work fine, and a lot of times better. I just recorded a really nice sounding lead track with no pedals, just my Dragonfly amp through a Swamp Thang speaker. One thing you find when you record is you don't need near as much distortion as you thought you did when noodling around at low volume. For other types of fx, except for my phase 90, I use commercial stuff.

I'm thinking of picking up a DS1 at some point, they are so cheap and plentiful. It's nice to have an extra goose for the "marshall" (modded PV) when playing the metal stuff with my son. The Tone Source does that well too.

Mini-toggle switches are a bad idea on floor fx boxes, period. If there's  a feature that's worth assigning a switch to, use another stompswitch. Overly crowded control panels on tiny boxes (a la 1590a or 1590b) are a bad idea as well. When on stage gigging, there's too much risk of breaking knobs/pots when using the stompswitch- unless you wear a size 5 shoe or something.

[Processaurus]

It's a good question, the high number of parts in boss pedals is intriguing.  They have some intense engineers!  One thing I've noticed is almost every input and output has a discrete buffer, this might be because they can take abuse better than opamps, and compulsively buffering things can solve some impedance issues and problems from people connecting them strangely, which would be perceived by non-technical guitar players as  increased reliability.

An interesting thing they do is to put a forward biased Si diode and resistor between circuit/chassis ground and the 2.1mm barrel connector minus, as a preventative measure for ground loops, as well as a beefy, reversed biased power diode across the V+ and circuit ground in case anyone fumbles with the battery and reverses it momentarily.

I like that despite how mass produced they are, they still use panel mount 1/4" jacks and pots and bypass tact switch.

[Top Top]

They definitely design their stuff to work with pretty much any type of signal level and impedance. You can plug anything into a boss pedal and expect it to just "work".

[Mark Hammer]

Since the BD-2 came up, I might point out that the BD-2 is essentially 2 op-amp gain stages in series.  The difference is, they are discrete op-amps.  Any given op-amp will have as many, if not more, "parts" in it, just buried under epoxy where you can't see them, and don't have to solder them.

I might also point out that when you go through any Boss or DOD schematic, and eliminate all the components required for electronic switching (and that includes the requisite buffers), the remaining circuits aren't all that complicated; certainly "bare bones" when compared to what you find in the Boscorelli book!

[Thomeeque]

Since the BD-2 came up, I might point out that the BD-2 is essentially 2 op-amp gain stages in series.  The difference is, they are discrete op-amps..

Plus there is some unusual passive equalisation before limiting diodes and some unusual active equalisation (using simulated inductor) in the last stage not found in usual TS clone.. T.

Btw. sorry, my link above is broken: Boss BD-2 Blues Driver

[amptramp]

A lot of production pedals use an SPST switch and a transistor flip-flop circuit and analog switches to switching the effect on and off rather than a 3PDT or DPDT switch.  When you are using two switch sections, you have to account for the input switching first or last when actuated to turn the effect on and the same thing when actuated to turn the effect off.  This can vary between switches and may change with a change in suppliers or some unannounced change at the switch factory, and suddenly a circuit which was in production and switched without popping will start to misbehave.

The SPST switch plus the circuitry costs less than the DPDT or 3PDT switch (which I get locally for $9.00 Canadian).  Even if you are just building one unit, the savings are similar.  Some people like true bypass switching because if you have a number of buffers in series with electronic switching, it can colour the sound and add noise.  If you do all of your switching between songs, true bypass is simple and it works, although the switch remains a significant reliability item, right behind the jacks.  If you switch a unit on or off in the middle of a song, electronic switching allows you to slow down the signal transfer so that there is no switch "pop".  True bypass may not be usable with some effects that are based on delay - if the unit is not continually processing input signals, you may get no output or only dry signal output unitl the delay period passes.

The link to the Boss Blues Driver is broken in the schematics section of the forum and the separate schematics page, but I have fouind another link that shows the similar switching circuit for the DS-2:

http://www.mif.pg.gda.pl/homepages/tom/files/DS-2.gif

And I see Thomeeque has found a copy of the Blues Driver schematic:

http://www.mif.pg.gda.pl/homepages/tom/files/bossBD2.gif

Note the 47 millisecond time constant for changing from effect off to on and back again set by R7 - C7 and R10 - C8 with 1 megohm resistors and 0.047 uF capacitors.  You can change state during a song with no audible effect.  There is no true bypass scheme that will do this.  And in spite of the complexity, the cost of the switch plus circuitry comes in under the cost of a multi-pole switch.

[ViolenceOnTheRadio]

Throwing my 2 cents in again, I have to also point out that in my personal experience, commercial pedals have a lot of problems because of the insanely complex circuit architecture. I wouldn't even attempt to DIY a lot of the circuits you vets come up with let alone a lot of these commercial designs I have schematics for. They tend to be noisy even at lower levels. They also tend to be very limited in terms of what amps they perform well with and which they don't. The only time most of these pedals served me well was when I was first starting out and playing through cheap amps that needed a stand alone distortion pedal slapped on the clean channel because the dirty channel was so useless. I have probably bought and sold 30 maybe even 40 overdrive and distortion pedals in a 4 year window. Then after being out of work for a while and low on cash, found myself in need and figured I could just build a Big Muff for a few bucks and it turned out I was right. I built 3-4 popular DIY circuits after that and found out that with this technology, less is truly more.

My current overdrive I designed has maybe a 15-20 part count including both actives, passives and hardware and I've yet to find an amp it can't make love to. So is it just me or are these guys more or less designing/building complex preamps that often have no practical use but for a very limited number of amplifiers.

Worst commercial pedals I've owned to date would be the Danelectros.
Best would be Sansamp and of course, my tube screamer.
Fact is, the few I still have all collect dust now.
I think in many cases, it's been a matter of giving someone the option to buy a 40-60 dollar pedal to use on a really scummy sounding amp and step up the performance to a respectable, usable level when you can't afford a new amp.

[Mark Hammer]

I keep promising to prepare a photo-augmented tutorial, but now I think it really needs to finally get done.

"Remote" switching of Boss-like pedals that use a momentary to actuate an electronic switch is a simple thing to retrofit. It involves putting a hole in the box for a mini-jack, but is non-destructive in that that it changes nothing about the normal functionality of the pedal.  What it DOES do is permit you to stick the pedal anywhere you want or need to, and run a slender cable to another spot on your pedal board, or wherever, and actuate the electronic switch remotely.  For that matter, you could run a sort of snake up to your pedalboard, and have a soundman do the pedal-switching for you from a little pushbutton unit by the soundboard.  Doing that with TB-based pedals would be a big nuisance, not to mention a potential source of noise and tonesucking, when all the needed cabling is considered.

So, the complexity of the switching circuitry actually can help to make other tasks much simpler and easier to implement.  I might point out that remote switching capability via a simple phone jack on the back, and an SPST momentary situated elsewhere, is something you often find with rack-mount equipment.

Stay tuned.

[Toney]

Worst commercial pedals I've owned to date would be the Danelectros.

Really? I have seen a lot of pro love out there for the humble Tuna Melt and I get a lot of mileage from the CC Vibe...
Why do you hate them so much?

[DougH]

  I get a lot of mileage from the CC Vibe...

I like that one too.

I also like Boss pedals. I have some from the early 80's that still work perfectly. Almost 30yrs out of a commercial floor fx box. Not bad...

[Fender3D]

I also like Boss pedals. I have some from the early 80's that still work perfectly. Almost 30yrs out of a commercial floor fx box. Not bad...

My old MXRs and EHs too

[PRR]

> Note the 47 millisecond time constant

It's not that simple.

The FET is biased near +4V. It will turn "on" (on-enough) when Vgs is less than about 3V (depends on device). Anything over 1V is "on". So on the up-ramp from zero to 9V, the ramp from the 1Meg+0.047u crosses 1V and the FET turns-on at about 4mS to 8mS (less than one time-constant). On the fall from 9V it won't get below 1V and turn-off for about 120mS (from 9V to 1V is more than one time-constant).

It is a make-before-break. There is a ~~5mS delay from press to start-of-switch. Both signals are connected together for ~~100mS. Then the going-off path finally breaks.

The actual crossover seems to be near 10mS wide about 20mS after press.

There is some distortion during turn-on/off, but the duration is short.

In general: Parts get cheaper/each the more you buy. MASS-produced resistors are SO cheap that you use one for any possible advantage. JFETs cost something, but less than a good mechanical many-pole switch, and the cot-over can be smoother.

The 3-Q discrete opamps cost several pennies more than a chip; however they may be designed to overload less abruptly. That is a Product Design Choice. But in context of the overall product, not a big one. The cost of a few parts is dwarfed by the cost of the case, knobs, and retail margin.

They have meetings. One guy says it could be cheaper. Another guy says the sample-testers preferred the more-parts design. The manager looks at the costs and possible more sales.

> So is it just me or are these guys more or less designing/building complex preamps that often have no practical use but for a very limited number of amplifiers.

It's just you (and some of the few hundred folks here). I too think that less is sometimes more. But in my experience, 98% of listeners and users just can't sense the difference.