Boss is a manufacturer of effects pedals for electric guitar and bass guitar. It is a division of the Roland Corporation, a Japanese manufacturer that specializes in musical equipment and accessories. For many years Boss manufactured a range of products related to effects processing for guitars, including "compact" and "twin" effects pedals, multi-effect pedals, electronic tuners, and pedal boards. In more recent times they have expanded their line to include Digital Studios, Rhythm machines and other electronic equipment.
When Roland decided to form a subsidiary company dedicated to guitars in the early 1970s, they originally intended to call it MEG (Musical Engineering Group). Realizing, however, that Meg was a girl's name and might dissuade male guitarists, they searched for a name that would connote power and mastership, and eventually came up with Boss.
The earliest Boss product was called B-100 The Boss, released in 1976. This came with a clip-on pre-amp and a pickup to amplify acoustic guitars. At this point the Boss company had not been formed and it was still technically a Roland product.
The first proper Boss foot pedal effect, in 1976, was called the CE-1 Chorus Ensemble, believed by many guitarists to be the "Holy Grail" of pedal chorus effects. It was a fairly large, mains-powered unit. It was popular with artists at the time such as Andy Summers and can be heard on various recordings. However the real breakthrough came the year later.
Boss's renowned line of compact pedals began in 1977 with the release of three pedals: an overdrive pedal (OD-1), a phaser pedal (PH-1) and a parametric equalizer called the Spectrum (SP-1). The now famous Boss DS-1 was released the next year, in 1978. Also released in this year is the T Wah (TW-1) pedal. Their first compact chorus pedal (CE-2) came the next year 1979, and their first flanger pedal (BF-2) the next 1980. In 1983 Boss broke new ground with the release of the DD-2 Digital Delay, the first mass produced digital delay in a compact pedal format. In 1987 Boss released nine new pedals, including the Turbo Distortion (DS-2). The Metal Zone (MT-2) was released in 1991. The Heavy Metal (HM-2) distortion pedal was an integral part of the guitar sound of many styles of heavy metal music ever since. Their big selling point has always been reliability - many compare their metal cases to a tank. As well as Boss's compact pedals sporting heavy-duty metal cases, they are colour coded in distinctive, bright colours. The pedals all share the same 'footprint', making it easy for guitarists to develop pedal-boards for the standard size.
Boss introduced COSM, Roland's proprietary version of digital modeling technology, into their AC-3 Acoustic Simulator pedal in 2006. Boss has since released several pedals using COSM, including the FBM-1 '59 Fender Bassman pedal and FDR-1 '65 Fender Deluxe Reverb pedal, introduced at the Winter NAMM show in January 2007.
All Boss compact pedals use a "buffered bypass" type of silent footswitching utilizing Field Effect Transistors (FETs) that produce no clicks or pops. Most guitarists feel that although buffered bypass switching is not as transparent as "true bypass" switching, the Boss version of buffered bypass is one of the best of its type causing very little signal degradation, while helping the signal to go through long pedal lines and cables without losing its fidelity.
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