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King Loudness « A very cool Boss driver. »
Published on 04/18/11 at 09:26This is another of Boss's standard stompboxes as far as the layout. This one was designed to capture a share of the burgeoning grunge/alternative rock movement of the late nineties. It's basically a very grainy and heavy distortion unit. It proved to be not so popular and was discontinued after only a few months of production.
It is equipped with four controls. There is a level control, a "fat" control (low end frequencies), a "muscle" control (midrange frequencies) and a drive control. There is also the standard PSA adaptor jack and 1/4" input/output jacks.
UTILIZATION
Setting up this pedal was not difficult to do. I purchased it from a local music store at the age of 9 and took it home and plugged in and was riffing right away. It was designed for the purpose of getting very thick and grainy chord tones for Nirvana or Smashing Pumpkins style music. I was using it for a combination of that as well as some older punk and it held up very well. It took me a little while to realize that "fat" meant bass and "muscle" meant middle as far as the controls went (I didn't have a manual for it) but I usually just set them at about noon and went from there.
SOUND QUALITY
I was primarily using this pedal with a G&L Tribute S-500 and various Yamaha electrics. I found it worked very well for the punk/grunge stuff that I was playing at the time. It's harder to give an exact opinion since it was many years ago that I owned and used this pedal regularly, but I remember being very happy with the pedal for about a year. However, at some point, something in the circuitry went awry and it failed to sound good from then on, so it went into the closet and I eventually traded it away. I'm not exactly sure what happened but it went from sounding very fat and chunky to oddly thin and weak. I replaced the battery numerous times, tried other cables, etc, but nothing changed it. Perhaps the pedal was discontinued due to reliability problems?
OVERALL OPINION
All in all I thought this was a great pedal for the purpose that it was designed. I heard a clip of it on a CD demoing various Boss pedals and thought it sounded stellar, so I was elated to track down "the rarest" Boss pedal about three months later. It worked quite well and gave me a nice grunge tone when I was using it. However, when it failed to work correctly after about a year, my interest wore off and eventually I got into more hard rock and metal music and this pedal fell by the wayside and I traded it after a couple years of it doing nothing in my closet. I wouldn't mind tracking another one down to try it again, but since they were only made for a few months, they are harder to find than most Boss pedals.
It is equipped with four controls. There is a level control, a "fat" control (low end frequencies), a "muscle" control (midrange frequencies) and a drive control. There is also the standard PSA adaptor jack and 1/4" input/output jacks.
UTILIZATION
Setting up this pedal was not difficult to do. I purchased it from a local music store at the age of 9 and took it home and plugged in and was riffing right away. It was designed for the purpose of getting very thick and grainy chord tones for Nirvana or Smashing Pumpkins style music. I was using it for a combination of that as well as some older punk and it held up very well. It took me a little while to realize that "fat" meant bass and "muscle" meant middle as far as the controls went (I didn't have a manual for it) but I usually just set them at about noon and went from there.
SOUND QUALITY
I was primarily using this pedal with a G&L Tribute S-500 and various Yamaha electrics. I found it worked very well for the punk/grunge stuff that I was playing at the time. It's harder to give an exact opinion since it was many years ago that I owned and used this pedal regularly, but I remember being very happy with the pedal for about a year. However, at some point, something in the circuitry went awry and it failed to sound good from then on, so it went into the closet and I eventually traded it away. I'm not exactly sure what happened but it went from sounding very fat and chunky to oddly thin and weak. I replaced the battery numerous times, tried other cables, etc, but nothing changed it. Perhaps the pedal was discontinued due to reliability problems?
OVERALL OPINION
All in all I thought this was a great pedal for the purpose that it was designed. I heard a clip of it on a CD demoing various Boss pedals and thought it sounded stellar, so I was elated to track down "the rarest" Boss pedal about three months later. It worked quite well and gave me a nice grunge tone when I was using it. However, when it failed to work correctly after about a year, my interest wore off and eventually I got into more hard rock and metal music and this pedal fell by the wayside and I traded it after a couple years of it doing nothing in my closet. I wouldn't mind tracking another one down to try it again, but since they were only made for a few months, they are harder to find than most Boss pedals.