Lotus Pedal Designs Desire Boost

The Desire Boost is a boost pedal from Lotus Pedal Designs, and it keeps things deliberately simple: one knob, a plain black label, and a circuit built around a JFET gain stage. Premier Guitar reviewed it as part of a boost pedal roundup and called it one of the more functionally simple devices in the group¹.

What it does

The single knob sets the boost level, and that is the whole control layout. Premier Guitar's reviewer noted the pedal "makes do with a little red paint and a plain black label," which gives a sense of how understated the design is².

Under the hood, the circuit uses a JFET gain stage. As the reviewer put it, this is "there to add a little grit and muscle to the boosted tone," so the Desire is not a perfectly clean volume lift but one that thickens the signal as it pushes it².

Input impedance and where it sits on a board

Lotus designed the Desire Boost with an extremely high input impedance. Premier Guitar's reviewer noted two practical uses for that: taming noise from noisy cables, and preserving a guitar's signal when the pedal sits at the front of a line of buffered effects². That makes it a candidate for the first slot on a pedalboard, ahead of any buffered pedals.

What reviewers said

Premier Guitar's reviewer summed the pedal up in pros and cons:

In other words, the clarity and low end held up well, while players who want a softer top end may find the high frequencies sharper than they would like²¹.

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