Many guitarists of the late 60s and early 70s knew how to get a rough earthy and unmistakable sound out of their humbucking pickups and tube amplifiers, which in retrospect has not been possible to recreate so far. BSM has dedicated so many booster pedals to this subject to receive these historical sounds with every tube amp, that offers a powerful clean or crunch character. But it ́s impossible to drive a treble booster pedal into saturation so the idea came up to develop a stand-alone version you can also use in front of a clean amp to get some crunch without the typical mid-honk sound and to replace the overdrive pedals on your pedalboard.

BSM - Meiser Electronics

Review by Gitarre & Bass

Demo by EytschPi42

Demo by Haiko Heinz

Manual

Product Page

Heritage Crunch Booster

BSM decided to take the idea of this classic Rock sound and came up with a completely different solution to hit the target. Not interested in making a simple copy of the circuit but developing own ideas to realize the functions with silicon transistors. What you get now is a flexible high gain treblebooster/preamp combination optimized for medium humbucker pickups that works also very well with P90s and singlecoils. It is intended to hit the high treble input of a British Plexi-type amp (or other classic British oriented tube amps) hard. What came out is a real monster, working at 18 volts. But we have to admit that it still works very well with 9 volts, just a little less monstrous. It also comes with a status LED. The preamp stage is a mild treblebooster of low noise followed by a high gain silicon output stage that can easily be symmetrically driven into saturation.

Black Box Booster

Starbreaker Booster

The BSM J-Fuzz stompbox is a faithful recreation of the old original Jennings Fuzz from the late 60's. Tom Jennings was founder and master-mind of the VOX company in the late 50's, accompanied by his friend and technician Dick Denney, who engineered the famous VOX AC30 amp as well as the VOX Defiant transistor amp with a built-in fuzz circuit. Both amps became well-known and famous because of the Beatles, who used those amps.

J Fuzz

Around 1960 the British Gary Hurst developed the first known distortion unit for electric guitar, which was available only as a custom order. So only a few were built and sold. Later, in 1965, Gary Hurst joined the team of Sola Sound, which was based in London. As an OEM-product, Sola Sound built Hurst's circuit, slightly modified and in a large production number, now called Tone Bender (Mk1.5) for the fellow British company Vox. Once developed and done, Sola Sound offered a minor number of the Tone Bender circuit under their own flag and brand. In fall 1966 Arbiter, the giant in the British music business, introduced a Fuzz unit under the name Fuzz Face, which looked unique, but was actually just a modification of the Vox/Sola Sound (Mk1.5). The Arbiter Fuzz Face generated a similar distortion sound like the Tone Bender (Mk1.5), but with more bass.

FuzzBender