Post
by zentropa » Fri Aug 11, 2023 5:58 pm
A few thoughts...
I believe for the past decade, Boss has been trying heavily to figure out what the market is demanding.
In some ways it reminds me of the early to mid 90s, when it seemed like pedal manufacturers had no idea what people wanted, so they just started trying a bunch of crazy pedal designs or marketing tactics while blindly throwing darts at the wall. The DOD Jason Lamb pedals and Boss XT-2, PW-2, etc. are symbols of this era.
I believe Waza and collaborations like the JB-2 and TB-2W was their desire to stay relevant with the shift towards boutique-ish pedals. I view the move to SMD was to maintain price points as best as possible without resorting to terribly built micro pedals like a lot of other brands that remove any/all hand-soldering. I believe anniversary pedals were meant to drive demand to re-buy, which is extremely common in the boutique-ish markets that do limited edition colorways and "new" versions (v1, v2, v3, etc.) that make like 1 or 2 minor changes. Brands like Walrus, JHS, and Earthquaker do that all the time.
I would agree that the last time I really felt they were trying to push things forward were during the COSM and early MDP days. At the same time, there's a market split between people going with things like Kempers or AxeFX and the ones who are sticking to singular pedals mostly want small tweaks to known circuits, e.g. True bypass Rats with diode clipping toggles, slightly modified Bluesbreakers, Big Muff and Tone Bender variants, Klon clones, etc.
Aside from Waza, I haven't really liked what Boss has been doing for the past decade, but I'm not really a fan of where pedals have gone in the past 5 years or so in general. Overall, I see a lot of what they have been doing lately as them trying to figure out what most people actually want and also figuring out how to be taken seriously by the pedal nerds that heavily fuel the pedal market.
Something I would like to see them do is have more pedals with the toggle switch for buffered vs. true bypass like the TB-2W. I think this would have a pretty large impact on the current perception of Boss pedals from the pedal nerds and give some nice flexibility for gigging musicians.