The Marshall BB-2 Bluesbreaker II is an overdrive pedal made by Marshall. It belongs to a family of Marshall pedals whose "blues breaker" name goes back to one of the most famous guitar sounds of the 1960s1.
What it does
The Bluesbreaker II is an overdrive pedal: it pushes a guitar signal into warm, clipped gain rather than the harder clipping of a distortion pedal. Its place in the Marshall line follows the original Marshall Blues Breaker, whose name and circuit have inspired a long line of overdrives from other makers1.
The name itself has a documented origin. As Guitar World's Damian Fanelli put it1:
"any gear-related combination of the words "blues" and "breaker" was and is inspired by Clapton's sound on this album"1
The album is Blues Breakers with Eric Clapton, recorded in 1966, where Clapton's cranked Marshall tone became a reference point for overdriven guitar1. That sound is what the Bluesbreaker name, and by extension the Bluesbreaker II, points back to.
Players comparing Marshall overdrives today can also look at the company's later amp-in-a-box pedals, including the Marshall 1959 Overdrive, Marshall JCM800 Overdrive and Marshall DSL Overdrive, which model specific amplifiers rather than the Blues Breaker lineage.
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Sources (1)
- Six Modern Effect Pedals Inspired by Classic Albums, Guitar World, 2018-02-08
