Category Archives: Orange Droolius

"Me Mates Crisps" for $1000, Alex.

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Roight, then.  I’ve built many a booster in my time, based around a few different circuits.  Usually they go away as quick as I build them, so this was an attempt to build all of them and have one of each at my disposal.  Four different boosters in a variety of autumnal colors.  How divine.

Left to Right they are: an AMZ Mosfet Boost,  AMZ Mini Boost, Balls Boost, and a ZVEX Super Hard-On.  The AMZ Mosfet is a pretty standard mosfet boost, which behaves like cranking a tube amp.  It provides volume and a little dirt, increasing toward the far end of the dial.  The Mini Boost is configured differently and provides a not-so-clean boost.  Its basically cranked and then the volume is attenuated at the pedal output so it always gets a *little* overdriven transistor tone.  The Balls Boost (formerly blogged as the “Orange Droolius”) is a modified version of the AMZ Mosfet which behaves similarly but adds a touch more filth and some extra bass.  The ZVEX SHO is stock.

Orange droolius.

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This is a pretty standard JFET type of booster which came about as an accident.  I had been making one specific tremolo for a few people (Erick Coleman, Will Adams) who, while they liked the tremolo, seemed more a fan of the boost/preamp that it gave then the actual  tremolo effect.  That isnt really a new phenomenon, though……EVH was known for running through the pre-amp of an echoplex without any echo effect just for some boost.

So at the request of Erick I isolated out the input gain stage, made some small mods to it, and built it as a standalone boost.  Per the man himself it sounds like “Link Wray in a box”.  Thats a lot of hairdo for such a small pedal.

Erick’s was orange and he named it the Orange Droolius, which sounds like a keeper to me.