For 40 years (and counting), the Boss SD-1 Super OverDrive has attracted guitarists with its jagged, granular drive tone.
BY DAVE HUNTER
AMID ALL THE exotic, vintage bucket-brigade delays and germanium-transistor fuzzes that qualify as classic pedals, one humble three-knob overdrive has been doing the job for 42 years with little romance or acclaim, and probably juicing the tones of more rigs and recordings than any other single pedal on the planet. Introduced in 1981, the Boss SD-1 Super OverDrive represented the OD pedal come of age — a just-right circuit for guitarists requiring pushed-amp tone in situations where an amp can’t easily be pushed, or providing just a little poke to take a lead from satisfactory to luscious.
Worth exploring in and of itself, the SD-1 is also worth considering in light of the many boutique and vintage reissue overdrives that cost two, three or even four times the price. For all the countless pedals that have made attaining a natural, tube-like overdriven amp tone their MO (many of which have been based closely or roughly on the SD-1 itself, or on its Ibanez rival, the Tube Screamer), this simple Boss pedal just gets the job done, and in a way that still comes as a breath of fresh air to many 21st century guitarists now discovering its charms for themselves.
Parent company Roland was making inroads in the effects market in the early to mid ’70s before the Boss lineup came along. The first promising sign came with the release of the CE-1 Chorus Ensemble under the Boss brand in 1976. Just a year later, the company hit the scene in a big way with what was arguably the most modern-leaning and thoughtfully designed pedal range on the market at the time. Forever after known as the “compact pedal series,” these brightly colored units displayed a number of next-gen performance features: a big and unmissable stomp switch that covered two-thirds of the pedal’s top and doubled as a hinged battery door with thumbscrew access, an LED indicator and a quality buffered bypass. It says a lot that the pedals have never gone out of fashion. With all the esoteric, small-shop, hand-wired pedals on the market today, Boss pedals appear on more professional boards than those of any other single maker out there, and tens of millions have been sold since the range was launched in 1977.
Along with the PH-1 Phaser and SP-1 Spectrum (kind of an enhancer/parametric-EQ combined),
