Ashdown Booster Shot

The Ashdown Booster Shot is a guitar boost pedal from Ashdown Engineering, the UK amp and effects maker. It is a straightforward boost: Ashdown describes it as a pedal that lets the player add both a high end boost and a full signal boost, so it can either lift the top of the tone or push the whole signal harder¹.

What it does

Ashdown's own description of the pedal is that it is "perfect for screaming leads that cut through as well as driving the front end of an amplifier from clean/light break up into overdrive while maintaining the guitar and amplifier characteristics"¹. In practice that means two uses players reach a boost pedal for: lifting a solo above the band, and hitting a tube amp's input harder so it breaks up earlier, with the amp and guitar still setting the character of the drive. For more on the type, see Boost Pedals, and for the driven side of that second use, Overdrive Pedals.

Build and switching

The pedal is housed in a custom designed steel casing that Ashdown says "will stand up to being stomped on night after night"¹. Switching is true bypass, so when the pedal is off, the signal passes through without the boost circuit in the path¹.

Where it came from

The Booster Shot appeared in press in January 2013, when Premier Guitar's news item on the Dr Green effects range described it as a pedal that "allows the player to add high end boost as well as full signal boost"². The Dr Green range is Ashdown's effects line, and the Booster Shot sits in it alongside pedals such as the Ashdown Triple Shot v1, a pedal that splits the signal into three frequency bands, Dark (lows), Medium (mids) and Light (highs), each with its own "Roast" gain control for blending three distortion voices³. Compared with that multi-band approach, the Booster Shot is the simpler tool: one job, adding level or top end, rather than reshaping the signal.