Isn’t it awesome how a super-affordable BOSS pedal can be tranformed into a borderline-Ferrari of tone by some extremely clever engineers?
New England’s stompbox pioneer Analog Mike aof Analogman was one of the first pedal makers (if not the first!) to mod the Japanese compact series devices(and resell them at a 3X price!).
In the video below, Mike Hermans checks out two classic mods: the BOSS DS-1 and MT-2 Pro ,pd.
Here’s more info about the MD-2 directly from Mike:
The takes the fakeness away, that cocked-wah super-saturated, big hair, harsh and noisy distortion. It leaves plenty of distortion available, but you can hear the guitar’s actual sound after the mod. On the stock pedal, if you sweep the mid range frequency knob it sounds like you are sweeping white noise. After the mod, it sounds like you are sweeping a parametric EQ or wah pedal. The mod is very expensive to do and includes two of our rare KOT clipping diodes, and a chip change on pedals made before 2008. As on the DS1, Boss copied some parts of our mods and are using the JRC chip we specified, on their newer pedals. Also it includes most of our silver mod parts from the tube screamer, many upgraded capacitors. The mod also reduces noise by 5dB with all knobs at 12:00.
I don’t usually offer sample settings but this one is a little tough so here is how I like to set it for a starting point:
Level 10:00, Low 3:00, high 1:30, mid freq 10:00, middle 1:30, Dist up high.
