The Pick of The Pedals - Boss BD-2 Blues Driver

In this week's pick of the pedals I'm taking a look at the Boss BD-2! I do realise that the last three pick of the pedals pedals have been Boss pedals, however as I currently am living at university I do not have my normal pedalboard setup with me, I just have a slimmed down rig, which consists of a tuner, the Boss BD-2 and the Boss DD-20 Giga Delay (check out my review of it here).

The Boss Blues Driver is a very transparent, relatively low gain overdrive pedal. Finished in Boss' standard single pedal housing, the build quality is high and any amount of kicking and high milage don't damage this pedal but make it look nice and used. This pedal has three simple controls: level, tone and gain, and for as long as it's been on my pedalboard (which, by the way, is since I've had a pedalboard), it's been set and left in a position where it works great for me with all my guitars.

With all controls at 12 o'clock, this pedal gives you a slight volume boost along with a raw, crunchy rhythm tone, great for blues and rock. This pedal is great at pushing the preamp valves in your amplifier, and with the amp tone set to begin to break up when you dig in, this pedal can take your tone from clean to dirty whilst still retaining the character of your amp.

Pushing the pedal gain on a clean amp channel can give you searing blues/rock lead tones, and almost fuzz-like rhythm sounds. An area this pedal works really well in is pushing a driven sound, whether it is amp distortion or distortion from another pedal, you can dial in as much gain as you need to make it work for you.

With the gain just above zero, you can push the volume of the pedal and use it as a 'close-to-clean' boost - it still gives you the BD-2 flavour, which I really enjoy. With a clean channel, this will just give you a clean boost, maybe into slight crunch depending on the headroom of your amp and how harsh you're pushing the preamp valves, but over a crunch channel, this setting can push your amp into really nice overdrive, as you can hear in the video. This pedal also cleans up really nicely, with crystal clean guitar tones available by rolling off the guitar's volume.

The tone control on this pedal is very usable, with mellow, creamy tones available by rolling the tone off, and biting trebly tones for cutting through any kind of mix if you need to! In general, all the features of this pedal are very usable for any kind of guitarist. I use this pedal with a small amount of gain, set just before 9 o'clock, a volume boost at around 2 o'clock, and tone at 1 o'clock. These settings give me a slightly overdriven clean boost which stacks really well with my 2 other overdrive pedals for different lead tones, and pushes my amp crunch tone into amp lead tone.

I love this pedal, and this type of pedal in general, and much like most of the Boss single pedals, this is fairly cheap, coming in at just under £60 on Amazon. It is worth pointing out that Boss do now offer a 'boutique' version of this pedal called the Boss Wazacraft BD-2, which has got extra features as well as the original BD-2 circuitry, so anyone who has a bit more cash to splash might like that version, but for what I use it for, this pedal does the job! I would be very interested in doing a shoot out with other transparent overdrive pedals, perhaps like the EHX Soul Food and the J Rocket Archer.

Let me know what overdrive pedals you use in the comments below,  remember to follow me on social medias, and you can now subscribe to the blog to get notified when new posts come out!