4 Boss DS-1 Style Pedals (Boss DS-1, Keeley Ultra Mod, Mooer Ultra Drive MkII, MXR ’78 Distortion)

A thorough comparison of the classic 1978 Boss DS-1 Distortion pedal, one mod, and two clones of that mod. Boss DS-1 Distortion Arguably the most popular distortion pedal of all time, certainly Boss’ best-selling pedal ever. Used by everyone you like from Kurt Cobain to Stevie Ray Vaughan. Keeley Seeing Eye Ultra mods One of Robert Keeley’s earliest and most famous pedal mods. Replaced many of the components with ones of higher quality, lowered the noise floor, and put the pedal’s original red LED into a clipping circuit (you can see it clipping in the ’O’ under the Tone control). The Ultra mod (switching the toggle down) is designed to give that ’Wall of Marshall amplifiers’ tone. MXR Custom Badass ’78 Distortion Reportedly a copy of Keeley’s DS-1 mods, and it certainly sounds identical (it even has a Keeley-ish blue LED for it’s Crunch button). In it’s ’normal’ mode it’s very similar to the Seeing Eye mod, and selecting ’Crunch’ sounds very much like the Ultra mod. Mooer Ultra Drive MkII Three modes - ’Original’, cloning the original DS-1, right down to its volume drop; ’Ultra’ cloning the Keeley Ultra mod; and ’Extra’ which is something of Mooer’s own devising, ’creates high gain distortion’ apparently. Gear: Fender Classic Player Jazzmaster (bridge pickup) Ammoon Stereo Looper Boss Katana 50w amp (Clean channel) mic’d with a Sennheiser e609 into a Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 Recorded in GarageBand, edited in Final Cut Pro X