Last Updated on August 12, 2022 by Play Guitar Notes
The Seymour Duncan Pickup Booster is a simple guitar effect pedal meant to give your signal gain boost to help you cut through a mix when you need it most. Designed for performance in mind, those of you regularly playing with other musicians will undoubtedly need to stand out more at key moments in a given song. This includes solos, lead harmonies, riff transitions, and so on. With this booster in your pedal board, you’ll have ready access to a significant amount of added power and resonance at the mere tap of your foot.
Sound
The Pickup Booster is also a good way to get a fuller, more robust sound out of your single coils if you want to play more aggressive and demanding, highly distorted music. A lot of players end up with single coil pickup guitars when they start out, particularly if you’re starting with a Fender or Squire model. Some forms of music, metal and hard rock, in particular, are much better served by humbuckers. Rather than having to go through the expensive process of getting another guitar or having your existing one refit with a new pickup, you can simply plug into this pedal to round out your existing single coil output nicely.
With some clever pedal organization, you can even use this pedal in between other effects as a line booster. If you want to give something like a flanger, delay, or chorus pedal enough bite not to wash your sound out too much, this is a perfect way to facilitate that. The line boosting quality alone makes this pedal an incredibly handy tool to keep at the ready.
Tone
Perhaps the best aspect of Seymour Duncan’s Pickup Booster pedal is the fact that it’s not going to alter your existing tones that much. Some gain boost pedals tend to add a little much hiss or fuzz, altering your overall sound profile and throwing off the tone. It’s completely counterproductive to spend a lot of time dialing in the exact sound you want through your amp only to have one of your essential pedals throwing everything off. This pedal is designed only to boost what’s going directly in without any unwanted alterations of any kind.
Advantages
This is largely accomplished by the pedal’s relatively simple composition. It’s made to boost the gain from a range of 0 to 25 decibels, turn off and on, and switch between two resonance settings. That’s the entire extent of the functionality, and it performs in expert fashion within that realm. You’ll notice it will even clean up your sound if you’ve been getting any sort of noise from your existing setup, and it does so even with the gain set to zero! You can consider that as yet another major advantage if you only have a guitar with single coil pickups.
Enhance Sound
By helping you enhance the sound of your pickups greatly, the pickup booster even saves you money in the long run since you can get more out of your existing guitar’s stock pickups. All considered, this is a really nice piece of gear that’s well worth picking up.