BD-2 Blues Driver

The BD-2 came out in 1995, smack in the middle of a decade that grunge still ran. Blues had crept back into the conversation anyway, and a new wave of blues players, Joe Bonamassa and Eric Gales among them, were getting noticed. The name on the box wasn’t subtle about who it was pointed at.

It was one of the early pedals that tried to put the behavior of a hot tube amp inside a small box: not just the sound of it breaking up, but the way it squeezes and opens up as you play. Boss’s phrase for what it was chasing was a tube amp’s “interactive gain and compression.”

It worked well enough that the blue box ended up nearly everywhere. The pedal builder Brian Wampler put it plainly:

One of those pedals that everybody has owned or at least played through once.

The Tube Screamer is built around an op-amp clipping stage. The Blues Driver doesn’t work like that, and the difference is the whole point.

Its first gain stage is a pair of transistors doing an op-amp’s job, built from separate parts instead of a chip. Wampler describes two of those discrete op-amps in a row, followed by an ordinary op-amp that makes the volume back up, boosts the bass, and buffers the signal on its way out.

There are clipping diodes, four of them to ground, two on each side. But most of the dirt comes from the gain stages themselves being overdriven. That’s much closer to how an amp gets dirty.

The tone section is borrowed from amps too: an amp-style tone stack, derived from a Fender combo circuit, with fixed values. Wampler hears an old Fender tweed Princeton in it. That’s the tone section, mind, not the whole pedal. Boss never claimed more than “inspired by actual amps.”

Three knobs: Level, Tone, Gain. That’s all Boss gives you.

Its best-documented work is rock, not blues. In 2013, on Green Day’s tour behind ¡Uno!, ¡Dos!, and ¡Tré!, Billie Joe Armstrong had a preset called “Big Effect.” It kicked in a BD-2 for his solos. His guitars on that run included a handful of Gibson Les Paul Juniors.

Three years later, making Revolution Radio, he was tracking guitars three and sometimes four deep. Some of it, he said, was about as simple as recording gets: “to get a really big tone, we’d just plug a guitar through a Boss Blues Driver and mess around with different echoes and delays.” He said a Blues Driver, and he didn’t say which one. By then there was more than one to choose from.

Boss’s own list of players runs from Prince to Steve Vai to Robert Smith to Courtney Barnett, whose 2015 gear list had a BD-2 on it. A list of names isn’t a song you can put on, though. For that, start with Revolution Radio.

Ask Josh Scott, of JHS Pedals, how he got into building them, and the answer is a Blues Driver. Two, actually:

I got into pedals because, as a player, I used two Blues Drivers together for years and years. One day, one of them broke. I opened it up and realized it was just a simple soldering fix.

He took charge of the thing himself, which is what the pedal had been asking players to do all along. He wasn’t the only one in there with a soldering iron, either. Wampler, Robert Keeley, and Scott all made their first start on the Blues Driver circuit. In 2008 Wampler published a guide to modding it, including a version he made at Brent Mason’s request, for better tone. Keeley had his “Phat Mod.” None of those were Boss models. They were players deciding the box could do more.

Boss made its own version. The Waza Craft BD-2W arrived in 2014, all-discrete, with a Standard mode and a Custom mode that Boss says “delivers new body and sustain.” In 2017 the regular BD-2 moved to surface-mount parts, which is why modders go looking for older ones. The same year Boss paired the Blues Driver with a JHS design, the Angry Charlie, in the JB-2 Angry Driver. Scott’s company and the pedal that got him started ended up in one box.

The plain blue BD-2 has been in production since 1995, and it still asks the same thing of you. Set the Gain somewhere sensible. Then play it with the two controls Boss never put on the box: the volume knob on your guitar, and your right hand.