Boss Book: The Ultimate Guide to the World's Most Popular Compact Effects for Guitar [Paperback]

Hal Leonard Corp. (Creator)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1, 2002

Why have guitarists bought over seven million Boss compact effects? Read this book and you'll understand! The Boss Book includes: the story in complete detail of every Boss compact effect ever made; super color photos, design history, trivia, tricks and secrets; candid interviews with the Boss founder and design engineers; essays on musical trends and famous players; and much more. As a bonus, the accompanying CD features 72 guitar sounds with control settings and detailed equipment set-ups so you can take your guitar playing to another dimension! "I've used Boss pedals since their inception ... For me, Boss has always stood for simplicity, reliability and great sounding, very high-quality effects." - Jeff "Skunk" Baxter (Doobie Bros., Steely Dan)

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Founded in 1947, Hal Leonard Corporation has become the worlds largest print music publisher, representing some of the greatest songwriters and artists of all time. We are proud to publish titles of interest to all musicians as well as music lovers, from songbooks and instructional titles to artist biographies and instrument price guides to books about the music industry and all the performing arts.

Product Details

• Paperback: 122 pages
• Publisher: Hal Leonard (January 1, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 063404480X
• ISBN-13: 978-0634044809
• Product Dimensions: 10.3 x 8.4 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #209,502 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

25 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A solid, well illustrated history and explanation..., November 29, 2002

By 

sir_isaac_newton (UK) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Boss Book: The Ultimate Guide to the World's Most Popular Compact Effects for Guitar (Paperback)

of all Boss pedals. You have to be a little obsessive to buy a book like this but effects are so poorly documented and described in general that I can see the need for this quite thorough document. Boss pedals were made in Japan (but now Taiwan) and enjoyed a reputation for quality sound and design and contruction. They are now battling (and involved in creating) large, low-cost, high-value multi-effects -- the book does a good job of pointing out the attractive simplicity of the earlier 2 and 3 control models over the new over-packed feature overloaded models and multi-effect units.

This book does a good job including personal accounts, reviews, lots of color and black and white pictures. Descriptions of each effect -- by model, not just type! There are also terse descriptions of Boss effects used by big name stars during different period (this struck me as rather superficial and not as interesting as I had expected).

Have you ever wondered how Overdrive differs from Distortion -- well the tables, graphs but especially the large number oscilliscope snap shots give you a pretty good idea of not only that but also how an OD1 differs from and OD2! They cover all of the main effects and some at several settings --- quite thorough. However, the actual implementation details are not discussed -- a serious oversight but perhaps understandable as this is their intellectual property. For example, I happen to know Boss use 3 diodes to produce their characteristic asymmetrical overdrive wave forms and the people looking for this type of book will often want to know such things, and that ODs put the voltage-clamping diodes into the feedback loop of an op-amp circuit for a subtle effect while a Distortion puts the voltage-clamping diodes across the output of an op-amp circuit to product hard signal clipping -- but you will not find that hear, instead you would need to go to the web (a guy in Australia has a great site but there are numerous others).

The other neat feature of this book is the enclosed *CD* which is great if you ever wondered what a particular effect sounds like (some Boss effects are now rare and some are fairly valuable -- supposedly). By the way, my favourite Boss effect is current the OS2 Overdrive/Distortion which you can set at either an overdrive, a distortion or something in between. The only drawback -- it actually costs as much as a distortion pedal plus an overdrive pedal(come on, offer us some real value!). The other thing is, with a Marshall tube amp, I find it hard to justify paying for a solid state distortion/ overdrive -- the amp does it all, at least as good and usually better. Most modern practice amps have distortion and OD capability built in - increasingly they offer reverb, chorus, delay and reverb too. There will always be some market for these discrete pedals though -- they contribute so much to rock and pop over the years.

You would probably be better off experimenting with the effects in a store but even larger stores rarely have a full choice available, so if you really must have effects (it could be argued that a good amp and a good guitar and is all that is needed) and Boss is your thing, then this is a really good book. It seems most guitarists consider at least one OD or distortion to be essential equipment (to allow the amp to be run for long periods without excessive "amp noise" but still allwoing it to kicked-up with the pedal for that big solo!). I would personally add a simple wah-wah (not covered in this book) to the list of essentials.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A good start., May 10, 2006

By 

Todd Matson - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Boss Book: The Ultimate Guide to the World's Most Popular Compact Effects for Guitar (Paperback)

I bought this book wanting to learn more about Boss effects pedals and other Boss items. I own five Boss pedals from the '80's and was curious about them. The Boss book is not written like a typical book of its genre. The sections are divided up with product information at the first, followed by a collection of related essays/writings, then examples of albums and songs where you can hear examples of effects being used, and finally, an index of sample sounds on the included CD.

The book shows every pedal effect made up to around 2001 with a description next to each one and the dates that they were in production. The pedals are logically grouped such as all overdrive pedals are listed then distortion then etc. and they are listed in order of year introduced--example the OD-1 is the first overdrive pedal listed. Since overdrive and distortion pedals are the most used by guitarists, in this first section there is additional information related to the 20 versions of overdrive and distortion pedals Boss has developed and where they fit along a distortion spectrum as well as a comparison of their sine wave signatures. I found this first section very helpful in becoming familiar with Boss pedals.

The next sections were all done in a essay or interview style. The most helpful was the interview with a guitar player who shares how the pedals have changed over time and how to identify the approximate time period a pedal was made. I used this information to identify my own pedals along with the production date information.

The rest of the essays and interviews tended to repeat some of the same information. Nowhere in the book did they tell you how to use Boss pedals, but if you looked at some of the pictures to see how things were arranged and read carefully through the interviews and essays, you could pick up hints about how some of the pedals were to be used, which pedals were better than others, or which ones produced unique sounds. In these sections you also get some insight into how and why certain products were developed or evolved. The CD gave a variety of sounds using Boss pedal with some of the sample tracks sounding like familiar songs.

Overall I think the book and CD were worth the money. To earn five stars they should have included some info about using their pedals and instead of using broad categories with the list of albums and songs they listed, it would be beneficial to have listed albums and songs by type of effect

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great book, very informative, tons of photos, December 26, 2003

By 

Martin J. Macary "Read everything and anything." (Wolcott, CT United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Boss Book: The Ultimate Guide to the World's Most Popular Compact Effects for Guitar (Paperback)

This book is for any guitarist, bassist or collector of BOSS effect pedals. This book reviews every Boss pedal ever made and gives information on dating Boss pedals. This book has interviews with the founder of Boss and a CD featuring the sounds of the pedals. If you're a pedal junkie like me, this book is for you. Now if Hal Leonard would only publish a book on Electro-Harmonix!!!!!!!