DS-1 Distortion

Boss, Roland’s pedal brand, brought out the DS-1 in 1978. It’s been in production ever since.

Along with the ProCo RAT, it made hard clipping popular: chopping the tops off the signal sharply instead of rounding them off, which gives a tighter, more aggressive sound than an overdrive. That whole kind of pedal came to be called a distortion pedal after the DS-1, the way Boss’s OD-1 set the shape for overdrives. When you picture “a distortion pedal,” you’re probably picturing something like this.

Inside, it works in stages. A transistor boosts your signal by about 35 dB, with a filter that keeps the bass from turning to mud. An op-amp pushes it harder into two silicon diodes, which do the clipping. Then comes the tone control, which works like a Big Muff’s and scoops out the midrange around 500 Hz with the knob at noon.

There are buffers at both ends, and Boss’s switching keeps your signal running through them even when the pedal is off. That isn’t true bypass, and some players care about that a great deal. Three knobs: Tone, Level, Distortion. That’s all there is to it.

The first DS-1s were built around a Toshiba preamp chip. In 1994 those chips ran out, and Boss redesigned the pedal around a Rohm op-amp. Players noticed. The new ones were quieter, they said, with a “fizzy” or “waspy” edge the old ones didn’t have.

The complaints fed a whole modding scene. Some of the big boutique pedal makers got their start opening up DS-1s and fixing what they didn’t like. Boss moved to a Mitsubishi op-amp in 2000, and that’s the chip still in there.

The family grew, too. The DS-2 Turbo Distortion arrived in 1987, with a second “turbo” mode that pushes the lower mids. John Frusciante used one. So did Kurt Cobain.

Cobain had 1980s DS-1s as well. When Nirvana made Nevermind in 1991, one was in his setup, along with a ProCo RAT, a Big Muff, and a Small Clone chorus. The RAT got the famous trick, plugged straight into the mixing desk, and all the attention that came with it. The DS-1 was right there next to it on the floor.

Satriani took it out on the road, too. On stage, he said, he went looking for “the simplest, smallest, most reliable thing I could find and I found those original Boss DS-1s.”

By 2021 the DS-1 was still Boss’s best-selling drive pedal. There have been special editions: a 40th-anniversary DS-1-4A in 2017, a Waza Craft DS-1W in 2023, an orange metallic one for Boss’s 50th the same year, and a run of store-exclusive colors. The basic orange box never went away.

Put on “Ice 9” and listen to the rhythm guitars. Satriani says they’re the DS-1, “so they’re a bit crunchier,” with an OD-1 in there somewhere too, he thinks. Nobody went hunting for anything rare to get that sound. It came off the same wall you’d walk past in any music shop, and it was plenty.