Which boost pedal do I need?

Rick Lee said:
I will never use this for home playing, only in a band situation. I will never use it for chords or any part of a song other than face-melting solos, where I need to really stand out. I use a TC Spark now and it sounds fine when I'm playing with the band. But when I go back and look at the gig videos, it sounds too buzzy or like it adds some distortion to my tone. I want nothing more than a transparent volume boost, as if I had time to run over and turn the dial on my attenuator. I'm leaning toward the EP Booster. Any other suggestions?
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I just went through this same scenario. Lots of good choices out there and suggestions here. But the answer no matter what you end up with to specifically boost the volume for solos is to run it in the loop, otherwise you'll just hit the front and and make it more distorted and / or fatter. I ended up with a bargain priced MXR Micro Amp Plus, ran it in the loop and solved all those problems in a real World gig situation Saturday night. done deal. I also ran across speculation that given MXR's rep for reboxing a product and call it something else the Micro Amp and CAE boost may very well be the same thing, guys with both can't tell the difference...

This is allegedly pretty badass too:

https://www.creationaudiolabs.com/mk423
 
My main gigging amp is a Metro clone of a '69 1959 SLP and with no loop. So whatever I get will need to sound great out front. My TC Spark is the mini one.
 
Yeah, a lot of boosts do sound great, but I imagine most guys in here are using all these nice recommendations in the general sense of boosting; for added saturation and maybe some EQ and not for straight volume boost. Might work out just as well in the end, but since it´s very different from turning up the attenuator a click or two you would need to change your expectations a bit.

In the absence of a loop you would need to run the amp very clean and rely on pedals for distortion to be able to boost volume from up front, in a overdriven circuit there´s just not any headroom to do it.
 
Another line of thought is to use a pedal to underdrive you amp and the switch the pedal off to get to the natural volume of your amp. For this you’d need a pedal with gain so that reducing the volume via the pedal doesn’t reduce the gain hitting the front end, RC Booster is probably a good shout for this.
 
My main amp has a Variac built into it, so I run it at a lower voltage to get some more dirt. I run both volumes on 6 all the time. It's pretty touch sensitive. If I hammer it, it's AC/DC in a box, but if I pick very lightly, it's pretty clean. Rolling the guitar volume knob back just a hair gives it Fender-like cleans. When I need some more dirt, I run a cheap old SD-1 with the drive almost all the way down. The older I get, the less distortion I use. But I need a boost for solos when playing with the band at a big outdoor venue.
 
Maybe you can wire in a simple volume/solo boost into the amp like Scott Splawn uses in his early modded amps before the quickrod model, It should be a simple mod it consists of a single latching footswitch and either a regular or stereo jack and a pot, I'm not sure what value. I know this works well in 2203 circuits but it should be doable in a 1959 no problem. I think you've build some Metro amp before so it should be a simple project for you. You would install the pot in the upper left input jack of the 1959. In the early modded amps he also had a rhythm/ lead switch for two different amounts of gain and the solo boost so he used a two button footswitch and a stereo jack for the two options so if you only do the solo boost with a single latching footswitch then a regular mono jack could be used I believe. I think it is a 250K audio pot coming off the master volume 1 MEG pot on the 2203 but I don't see why you could not wire it of the bright volume pot of the 1959 exactly the same.

It would give you strictly a volume boost with no alteration of your gain settings because you would not be stacking more gain/DB into your gain preamp levels so I think it would solve all your issues.

PM me if you want a layout diagram for it.
 
Just put the TC spark in your loop instead of in front of the amp. It should do the trick just fine.
 
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