A smooth medium gain overdrive that is great for Blues and Fusion leads.
The MI Audio Blue Boy Deluxe v.2 Overdrive is the king of smooth, singing low and medium gain sounds. The Blue Boy overdrive is an amazing effects pedal for Blues and Fusion leads.
Gain Control: The Gain control of the Blue Boy Deluxe is designed to have a wide sweep of gain sounds. With the Gain control at minimum, the sound is pure clean. At about 60%, you have as much gain as a TS style pedal. With the gain maxed, you have 3 times the gain of a TS type pedal.
Despite this amount of gain, the Blue Boy pedal's delivery is very smooth. At the same time, it is very faithful to your original tone, so if you dig in, the Blue Boy Deluxe will follow very nicely. The Blue Boy Deluxe doesn't compress as much as a typical TS type of pedal. This makes it a much better mate than a TS type of pedal for higher output single coils and humbuckers.
Character Control: This is a feature which is not available from any other manufacturer. This is effectively a pre-overdrive bass control. By controlling the amount of bass in the pre-overdrive signal, you can change the character or feel of the overdriven sound. By turning character all the way down, you can get great, tight, high gain sounds, wonderful for palm-muting. Turning up the character adds more 'momentum' to the tone, and works wonderfully with single note work. Most other pedals will only have one static 'character' for the overdrive.
Tone Control: This is a 'balancing' control. Unlike other designs which progressively roll off the top end of your guitar sound, this tone control affects both the low and high frequencies. It's effectively like having a 2-band low/high EQ. As you turn down the tone control, the lows increase, whilst the highs increase. Visa versa as you turn up the tone control. This, in conjunction with the mid, brightness and internal presence controls means that you can dial in almost any tone you like.
Mid Control: A dedicated midrange control is very important as the mids dictate how well a pedal sits in a sonic mix. The mids control just the midrange, whilst the tone control adjusts the low/high balance. The mid control featured on the Blue Boy Deluxe is unique in that it is highly interactive with the tone control.
Brightness Control: This was initially an internal control (like the character control), but has been turned into an external control. The brightness control was initially designed to allow users to match the brightness of the pedal for their rig and taste. It was intended as a set-and-forget control for people with a consistent rig. However, a common request from many professional players who found themselves using different 'house-rigs' every night was to make this control external so that they sound set the brightness from night to night. This is the last tone shaping control in the signal path.
Volume Control: The final output section of the Blue Boy Deluxe has been designed to provide you with maximum output volume. With the volume turned all the way up, the output signal can reach 14Vpp, which can seriously overdrive a good tube amp. The volumes control is also a logarithmic or 'volume' taper, which means that when the control is set to 12 noon, the volume is only 15% of the way up, so there's plenty of volume up your sleeve should you need it.
