Boost pedals are a necessary, if not wildly exciting, necessity for pretty much any electric guitar player. The 29 Pedal JFET is presented as a reimagining of the most humble of stompboxes, by a company that has proven uber-competent in the realms of tone-preservation and enhancement.
The JFET’s circuit gives your tone a mostly clean amp-like character, while offering three distinct modes to tailor the frequency response according to your preferences.
- In “N” mode (Normal), it emulates a treble booster, reminiscent of the classic vintage RangeMaster design that adds a high end sparkle to the signal.
- “F” mode enhances the frequency spectrum for a more rounded sound,
- “X” mode maintains a nearly flat response down to 10Hz and below.
The “L” knob provides seemingly straightforward level control, but it operates as a post-boost, pre-output drive gain fader. The JFET’s internal boost gain is fixed at approximately 19dB, ensuring optimal character, noise performance, and impedance.
As always with this type of pedals, it’s all about the tone, which you can hear in the videos below. We added it to our comprehensive article about the best Best Treble Booster Pedals & Rangemaster Clones.
29 Pedal JFET Boost, Builder’s Notes
What can be said about the humble boost pedal? It’s an AC wave riding on a DC voltage and I did my very best to elevate it.
JFET is rooted in my deep love of FET transistors, and their corresponding place in the hearts of many pieces of gear. FETs are very early solid-state devices that were designed to emulate vacuum tubes as closely as possible, and they have found their way into a sizeable number of classic pieces of gear.
As usual for 29 we don’t copy or emulate any of those, but start from a ground-up design. The JFET stage is neatly biased for a specific THD ratio, just enough hair to be tube-y but still very clean by most standards. A dual-stage IC output driver shapes the tone and ensures the output impedance stays constant as you turn the level fader.
The three modes tailor the low end in a gentle way for fine-tuning of the boost sound with your guitar. Sounds great after EUNA, or as an alternate front-end to your board, makes about 18dB of gain and LOVES to be stacked with FLWR and other drives! Will happily drive cables and draws about 150mA. Still features our WHATEVER internal power supply and the build quality you’ve come to expect from BELIEVABLE AUDIO.
