Bogner Ecstasy Blue Mini

The Bogner Ecstasy Blue Mini is a compact overdrive pedal from Bogner, a scaled-down version of the company's full-size Ecstasy Blue preamp pedal. Premier Guitar described it as "a pared-down stomp with nearly all the features of the larger Ecstasy Blue in half the space," and Reinhold Bogner packed the essential elements of the Blue's big brother into the compact enclosure¹. It went on sale on 19 November 2018 at $199, and Premier Guitar still listed it at a $199 street price in its 2023 review²¹.

The pedal covers clean tone shaping and low-to-mid overdrive territory. Premier Guitar's reviewer found "incredible low- and mid-gain tones" and, on those settings, "clarity and harmonic richness was quite stunning"¹.

An Ecstasy Blue in half the space

The Mini is the board-friendly version of a pedal players already loved. At Bogner's Winter NAMM 2018 booth, the company demonstrated that two Mini pedals fit in the space of one previous full-size Ecstasy pedal, keeping the same profile⁵. Gearnews reported the Minis as based on their bigger siblings, "just more compact and easier to squeeze onto a pedalboard," and reportedly carrying the same circuits as the original Ecstasy Red and Blue pedals³.

The full-size Ecstasy Blue, released in 2012 alongside the Ecstasy Red, is built in a tough two-piece aluminum clamshell box fastened by four machine screws, with a board populated with select components: Japanese Nichicon and German WIMI caps, gold-plated relays, and Carling switches for true bypassing and boosting²⁶⁷. The Mini keeps the true-bypass switching of the original⁴.

The controls: three mini switches and a Variac

The Mini carries volume and gain knobs plus an active 3-band EQ, a variac switch, a 3-way gain toggle, and three different EQ profiles¹. The switching breaks down like this:

In Bogner's NAMM demo, the gain structure switch on the Blue was described as having three settings, high, medium and low, alongside the pre-EQ voicing switches⁵. The Variac deserves a word of explanation: on the full-size Ecstasy pedals it acts like an actual Variac transformer by lowering the pedal's voltage, giving the tone more sag and pulling back the volume⁷. It is the pedal equivalent of running a tube amp starved, the way players did with real Variacs in the studio.

The pedal also has a low battery indicator, with LEDs that blink when battery voltage drops below a critical threshold², and input, output and remote jacks².

History: from the Ecstasy amp to the Mini

The lineage runs from the amp to the floor. Reinhold Bogner debuted the Ecstasy amp nearly 30 years before Premier Guitar's 2023 review, and the Ecstasy head was first introduced in 1992¹⁹. In 2012 the company introduced pedals inspired by Ecstasy circuits, each based on a channel from the Ecstasy series: the Blue takes the Ecstasy blue channel¹⁷. Bogner's pedal line-up has since brought the tones of the Uberschall, Shiva and Ecstasy amps to the floor¹⁰.

The Mini versions were demoed by Steve and Jamie of Bogner Amplification at Winter NAMM 2018⁵. Bogner announced the production versions in November 2018, and the Ecstasy Red and Blue Minis became available from 19 November at $199 each².

What reviewers said

Premier Guitar's 2023 review was positive, listing as pros the "incredible low- and mid-gain tones" and "versatile EQ controls and useful EQ profiles"¹. The reviewer's overall take on the Ecstasy Blue line:

Premier Guitar, on the full-size Ecstasy Blue⁷

At NAMM 2018, Mitch Gallagher of Sweetwater found the Minis sounded great and that the small board footprint was a big plus⁵. Guitar Pedal X's Stefan Karlsson, writing in 2020, called the Blue variety "great in both original and Mini editions"¹¹.

In Sweetwater's demo video from the Bogner booth, Steve and Jamie from Bogner Amplification walk through the Mini Ecstasy Red and Blue overdrive pedals, showing the controls, the gain structure switch's three settings, the pre-EQ voicing switches, and how two Minis fit in the footprint of one full-size pedal. Mitch Gallagher notes they sound great and that the compact size is the point of the exercise⁵.

Click to load

Videos

Click to load

Click to load

Click to load

Questions