Visual Sound Truetone Clean Boost

The Visual Sound Truetone Clean Boost is a compact clean boost pedal: it pushes a tube amp into natural breakup or cuts through a dense mix without coloring your core tone. Visual Sound, the company that later took the Truetone name, listed it at a street price of $99¹.

Controls

The pedal is deliberately simple. Premier Guitar's review opened with exactly that point: "The Visual Sound Truetone Clean Boost pedal is deceptively simple: two knobs, and an On/Off button."¹

How it sounds and how it is used

Truetone describes the pedal as "Transparent By Design," offering transparent gain without altering your core tone². The maker's own framing is that the 15dB of transparent gain can push an amplifier into natural breakup or simply cut through a dense mix².

Premier Guitar's demo video, presented by Joe Coffey at Summer NAMM '09, framed it as a gain-staging tool: "Truetone Clean Boost is a way to push the front end of your tube amp. Then again, it's also a great way to push a good overdrive pedal a bit harder."³

The review went further than the maker's copy. Premier Guitar noted that "In its simplest guise, it's a high-gain preamp," and gave a clear verdict on amp pairing¹:

The reviewer found it excels as a quasi-overdrive into warm multistage tube preamps¹. For players weighing it against other boosts, Xotic's RC Booster V2 advertises a "Super Transparent 20dB+ Clean Boost"⁴, a larger stated boost range than the Truetone's 15dB.

Power and the buffer

A detail worth knowing: the pedal runs internally off of 27V, with the voltage bumped up inside the pedal rather than requiring a special external power supply. As Joe Coffey put it in the demo video, "it runs internally off of 27V - so all of that boost is clean."³ That internal voltage step-up is part of why the boost stays clean at high settings.

The pedal also carries an integrated Pure Tone buffer circuit, the same buffer circuit found in every Truetone pedal². That places it in the buffered camp rather than true bypass, which matters on large boards where long cable runs can dull the top end.

Build quality

Premier Guitar's reviewer found the Visual Sound housing and foot switch robust, but flagged one fault: "the aluminum shell of the Truetone's volume knob had come unglued from its plastic core." The maker will replace the volume knob, which the review described as a rare shipping problem¹.

Part of the V2 Series

The Clean Boost sits in Visual Sound's V2 Series, a line that also includes the V2 Open Road overdrive, with its Drive, interactive Tone and Volume controls⁵, and the V2 Route 808, which carries Drive, Tone and Volume knobs⁶. Players comparing boosts against overdrives may also want the overdrive pedal type page or the Boss SD-1 vs Ibanez TS9 comparison.

Videos

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Questions