Lotus Pedals Purple Boost Pedal

Being studio rats ourselves here at Vintage King, we know the abject horror that can overcome an engineer when a client drags one of those solid state DSP modeling amps in the studio and then demands you make it sound like Albert King or Jimmy Page. Sure, you can get all technical and try to explain why that isn’t gonna happen, but, if they knew that in the first place, they would have just bought a good tube amp, right?

Thanks to the Purple Boost, you can just nod your head knowingly and reach for their guitar, plug it into that sad excuse for real amp tone, and prepare for provocative rock poses. Designed to emulate the natural warmth and drive of a good tube amp without those pesky tubes that require high voltage, the Purple Boost's discrete Class A circuit utilizes JFET transistors in the gain stage for their ability to mimic the complex harmonics of a vacuum tube pushed to the point of breakup.

In keeping with Lotus Pedals’ design simplicity, the controls are spare—just Drive and Volume—but fully interactive. With the Drive knob fully counter-clockwise the pedal acts as an extremely transparent clean boost with up to 22dB of gain on tap. However, as you turn up the Drive knob it adds third-order harmonic distortion to simulate classic tube saturation. We really like the gnarly tortured transistor tone and how touch sensitive the response is. Need to make a solid-state or DSP amp sound like a 50-Watt Marshall or Fender Tweed fast without wading through hierarchical menus on an LCD scree for hours? Then this is the pedal for you.