O.C.E. Pedals
The Maryland Boost is a collaboration between me and my good friend Mark Hopkins. When I sent Mark the Pliers overdrive/boost last year he really fell in love with the boost side and asked me if I could do it as its own pedal. We bounced some ideas back and forth and eventually it turned into a signature pedal.
The Maryland takes everything people loved about the boost in the Pliers: the dirty edge that can get almost fuzzy with the bias dimed and the ability to tweak the frequency to suit your amp or pedal board. It adds a Level control to tame the output if you're running into a really high headroom amp and a switch which can remove the clipping diodes from the circuit and give a little more clean output to the pedal. It's a subtle change but it can help if you want to use it to hit the front end of an amp harder.
Controls are:
LEVEL: Controls the overall output of the pedal
BIAS: Controls the bias of the transistor, it's a mix between a gain and a texture control
FREQ: Controls the frequency of the boost, can go from a more full boost to almost a trebel booster.
CLIP/LIFT: The switch allows you to lift the clipping diodes from the circuit for a little more clean output. If you lift the diodes and then turn the FREQ all the way down it removes the tone control from the circuit and adds a little more output.
As a proud Maryland boy, Mark wanted to base the pedal around the Maryland flag so the aesthetics of the pedal are all based around the color scheme of the state flag. The gold hardware, the subtle gold in the powder coat, the off-white labels, all the way to the red of the LED.
All O.C.E. Pedals are hand-built in Burbank, CA with premium components and lead-free solder.