JHS Solo Boost
This week, we’re dropping a brand new, limited release pedal, and it may have the craziest backstory of any pedal in the JHS lineup– a lineup, to remind you, that includes unicorns, penguins, panthers, rats, bears and cheeseballs.
Naturally, we’re talking about the Solo Boost.
Now, this story goes all the way back to 2018. It was a different world. Donald Trump was president. They’d just released the second half of that nine-hour Marvel movie where the Avengers end the world. Drake dropped a really hot track called “God's Plan.” Oh, and JHS was preparing to release the Solo Boost. At the time, we were planning to do an initial release of 1,000 units, but four years later we’ve only got 817 pedals. I’m not sure what happened to those other 183 pedals. Maybe they were sucked into another dimension, Stranger Things style. Maybe we threw them away in a fit of Marie Kondo-induced spring cleaning.
Honestly, your guess is as good as mine. But we have to move forward with the story.
The Solo Boost release got pushed back to Spring 2020, A.K.A., when the world shut down. To accommodate the national quarantine, we moved JHS out of the office and into our homes for a good period of time. Because the market was in a major state of uncertainty, we had to pivot. Instead of releasing the Solo Boost, we fast-tracked another project called the Legends of Fuzz, which we felt was more exciting and would be easier to build at home. Thus, we quite literally shelved the Solo Boost for two more years.
In that time, we released the 3 Series and the PackRat, but we’ve decided the time has come to let the Solo Boost fly…well, solo.
Now let’s take a look at the pedal and how it functions. It really only has two controls:
The big, giant red knob is the volume or gain of the boost. If you turn it up, the pedal gets louder. As you turn this up, it simply takes your guitar, makes it louder without adding any distortion. But because it's so loud and clean, you can use that to distort the amp, which makes it very useful.
The tiny switch on the side of the pedal allows you to switch between two boost circuits: a FET boost (or field effect transistor boost, which was made famous by the Keeley Katana) and a classic op amp style boost (much like you’d find in the MXR Micro Amp or how many people like to use the Klon nowadays - gain off and just using the volume for boosting your signal).
Limited edition means limited, folks, so snag your Solo Boost while you can!