treble booster

A treble booster is a boost pedal that emphasizes upper mid and high frequencies to push a tube amp into overdrive¹². Besides enhancing treble response, it adds its own subtle harmonic distortion and gives push to saturate the front-end of a tube amp³. It was used by almost all British rock guitarists with single coil pickup guitars from the late 60s to the mid 70s, and by players like Eric Clapton, Ritchie Blackmore and Brian May to make dark-sounding Britrock amps cut through the mix⁴⁵. Treble boosters were fundamental to the evolution of blues-rock and classic metal tones, and were largely replaced by the end of the seventies by Japanese overdrive circuits such as the Tube Screamer, which were based acoustically on them⁶⁷.