BSM Heritage Crunch

The BSM Heritage Crunch is a treble booster pedal with a built-in crunch overdrive, made by the German builder BSM. BSM describes it as "not only a booster and a kind of moderate version of the Supreme, offering an outstanding fine crunch tone"¹. In other words, it does two jobs: it can push an amp the way a classic treble booster does, and it can add its own moderate overdrive character when you turn the gain up.

BSM positioned it as the company's second stand-alone stompbox, introduced after the success of the BSM SUPREME special overdrive, which had become one of its bestselling pedals². The company describes the Heritage Crunch as a booster and a kind of moderate version of the Supreme².

A treble booster with a crunch

The Heritage Crunch sits between two categories. It is a boost pedal in the treble booster tradition, but BSM conceived it "especially for customers who seek more than just a distortion-free booster," with overdrive arriving above a certain gain setting³. BSM describes the result as "an outstanding fine crunch tone" without "the typical mid-honk sound" of many boosters¹.

The circuit is based on the concept of BSM's RW-F Treblebooster, but the crunch character comes from somewhere else entirely: a special JFET stage designated a "mu-amp," a design BSM says was patented in the 1960s and all but forgotten. Reinvestigating that circuit, BSM discovered it delivered what the maker calls a delicious crunch effect, and decided to build a pedal around it³.

BSM says the pedal "will work perfectly for humbucker and single coil pickups"¹, which distinguishes it from vintage-style treble boosters voiced for low-output single coils. The maker also notes it works in front of older amps with only mid-gain, and in front of a clean transistor amp, to get a crunch tone⁴.

Controls

With the volume control, BSM says you can balance between FET and Triode crunch in very fine steps⁵. The crunch knob sets the gain, and turning it back converts the pedal into a clean booster⁴.

Clean boost and gain

The Heritage Crunch has a lot of gain on offer, up to 16dB of variable crunch¹, but it is equally usable as a linear clean boost pedal with the crunch rolled back². The maximum output voltage when the strings are struck really hard is 2V², enough to drive the front end of a tube amp hard without the signal levels a modern active boost can produce.

For players comparing it against other BSM designs, BSM itself frames it as a moderate version of the Supreme², with the Supreme Special Overdrive sitting above it in the range.

Power and placement

The pedal runs on a 9V battery with a current consumption of approximately 4mA¹. There is no external power supply mentioned in BSM's documentation, so battery power is the way the unit was built to run. BSM notes that the negative pole of the battery is ground².

Placement matters with this pedal. BSM states plainly: "The 'Heritage Crunch' Treble Booster is inserted between guitar and amplifier, not into the FX loop"¹. Like other treble boosters, it is designed to interact with the guitar's pickups and push the amp's input, not to sit in a loop after the preamp.

Who designed it, and where BSM went

The Heritage Crunch was designed by Bernd C. Meiser, whom BSM called "our tech-head and mastermind"². Meiser designed the whole BSM range, including the Supreme Special Overdrive⁶, and the mu-amp reinvestigation behind the Heritage Crunch was his work³. The first Heritage Crunch models came off the production line in April 2021 and were sent out for testing, according to BSM's news page⁵.

The first "Heritage Crunch" models ran off the production line and were sent out for testing⁵. BSM introduced the Heritage Crunch as its second stand-alone stompbox, following the Supreme Special Overdrive².

Videos

Click to load

Click to load

Click to load

Questions