The Blue Boy is my personal go-to pedal for low/medium gain. I started thinking about doing the Blue Boy as a result of the many requests I'd received about creating something in the vein of the classic TS pedal. I must confess, I was a bit hesitant given the number of boutique builders out there doing TS clones and mods. Cloning has never really been my thing.

First Iteration

The Original Blue Boy Overdive

So I started to muck around with designs. I asked myself the question, "what things can be improved with in the TS", and I came up with a rather considerable list, which grew with time. As the list grew, the design mutated to accommodate these improvements, to the point where the final Blue Boy looked nothing like a TS. The final list included the following items: Wider gain range - less gain at minimum setting, and more gain at maximum setting. Better match for all pickups. Better match for a wide range of amps. less compression, especially with higher gain sound. Better tone control. Better components. socket-mounted IC so that people can experiment with different ICs True Bypass. Controllable mid-hump. More output volume. Controllable 'character'.

The first version Blue Boy included 3 external controls (gain, tone and volume), as well as the following internal controls:

• character - a pre-overdrive bass control for making the Blue Boy sound more like a vintage fender amp when cranked.
• brightness - for controlling the top end of the Blue Boy to match different amps.
• voicing - for controlling the mids/highs, in order to tame the mid-hump.

The Deluxe edition

The Blue Boy was a resounding success. But wanting to continually improve the design, I took the Blue Boy design to the next logical step. The most obvious thing to do was to make the internal controls external. The logic behind this was the same as that for the new Tube Zone, namely to help musicians who use multiple rigs, or gigging musicians who have to rely on 'house rigs' to match the Blue Boy to these different rigs. There's now no need to open up the pedal. Also, The output volume was further increased, and the voicing control mutated into a dedicated midrange control.