Sound Island

I am deeply impressed by the sound this baby produces. It was a pleasant experience to use this BOSS’ creature. Now it is definitely one of my most favourite distortion pedals along with BOSS MT-2 Metal Zone and AMT Fatal Tube.

As its name says, first of all, by using this effects pedal you can get a heavy metal sound like, you know, Iron Maiden. But furthermore, it also provides you with wide range of distortion settings so you can find grunge or nearly overdrive sound as well.

I personally used it to form ’80s hard rock sound (Scorpions, Yes!) and the pedal was really perfect in it, at least on my set-up (Fender Stratocaster, Marshall 100 watt amp, Marshall “head”). So in the first place I recommend this effects pedal to those who needs this type of sound.

On the other hand, I’m sure if I get on with experiments with distortion settings and other equipment, more new interesting sound would come up. Maybe something like Alice Cooper’s or even industrial or nu-metal. Just keep turning knobs and find your sound.

This is one of the most amazing pedals I ever used and no doubt one of my favourite ones. One of the most notable features is that the pedal has some kind of equializer settings. This does not include particular frequencies ranges settings, but provides you with a handy feature of rough “low-mid-high” fixing.

I generally used it with Peavey Classic combo and this combination gave me a lovely warm sound suitable for blues and hard rock. But surprisingly, when I tried to use another combo (Fender) I found out that the pedal was able to give me a powerful, dense nu-metal sound. The only setting I had to fix was cutting off the mid. I suppose it should also be tested with Mesa Boogie amp equipment. Probably its sound can be far more inpredictable and impressive.

Following the maker’s description (and the pedal’s name itself), it has a tube emulation, which means that you can output it right in the line. It’s quite easy to misjudge this feature, but I used to play through this distortion pedal plugged into PC and I have to say its sound has not nothing to do with that terrible fuzzy high-pitched noise which other distortion pedals generates in the same conditions.

Metal Zone is the most famous and one of the “classic” creations BOSS prouds of. And definitely it is one of the coolest of them. Flexibility is what I love it for. It allows you to form various distortions effect of wide range. Its distortion, drive and really rich equalizer settings open new horizons for your acoustic imagination.

It’s really versatile product, it always will be a good choise, whatever your style might be: heavy metal, grunge, death, progressive or hard-rock. For calm music it gaves you a slight distortion, which can not be reach, for example, by using BOSS Mega Distortion pedal.

I highly recommend this distortion effects pedal for all the guitarists interested in hard and dense sound.