Boss Equilizer GE 7 > Reviews > "The Equalizer"

Author's product rating:   

Ease of Use	Easy
Durability	Excellent
Value for Money	Excellent

Advantages:	Good sound, flexibility, reliable
Disadvantages:	Almost too much to fiddle around with !

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

Boss have been producing good quality guitar pedals for many years now and are probably the best know name in guitar pedal manufacture.

The pedal I am reviewing here is the GE-7 Equaliser pedal.

I purchased this pedal a second hand about four years ago and I paid £49 for it.

Out of interest, this particular pedal is an earlier Boss Japanese model. These are regarded by many as better quality than the newer models which are now made in Taiwan.

Construction
The GE-7 has a solid looking, all metal construction which I alreay know has taken many years of punishment!

The pedal is a compact size with a large switch on the top to turn the effect on and off and a rubber slip-proof mat on the bottom.

The pedal can be powered by a 9V battery, or by an external 9V power adapter.

The controls are mounted on the top of the pedal. As this is a graphic equaliser, there are 8 slider controls on this pedal, 7 of which allow you to boost or reduce the sound across a wide range of frequencies and the 8th allows you to control the overall level of the effect.

In Use
Getting the pedal set is up very simple, all you need to do is plug the guitar cable into the Input and then plug the cable from the guitar amplifier into the Output. Stepping on the pedal switch turns the effect on and away you go!

This is a very flexible pedal. As with the other single function Boss pedals I have the sound effect is pleasingly warm which doesn’t mess up your guitar tone.

You can alter the sound frequencies over a wide range, which I imagine have been specifically chosen by Boss to match the frequencies that the electric guitar produces.

The frequencies available to be adjusted from lowest to highest are, 100Hz, 200Hz, 400Hz, 800Hz, 1,6kHz, 3.2kHz and 6.4kHz. Each slider has a boost/cut of +/- 15dB. This allows for a great deal of flexibility for those that like fiddling around with their guitar tone!

This pedal can be useful in a number of ways. It can help you to produce a specific guitar sound, i.e. if you like the modern “scooped” distortion sound, this can be achieved by reducing the middle three sliders on this pedal and boosting the 100hz and 6.4khz sliders. It is also useful for fine tuning your guitar sound as it gives you have far more flexibility than the tone controls on most amplifiers.

Another use for this pedal, (and the way I use it) is as a boost for lead guitar solos. Even though I am using a three channel Marshall TSL100 amplifier, this pedal still comes in handy for adding a bit more boost and thickness to the distortion channel to help lead guitar work to cut through the rest of the band at gigs.

In terms of reliability I have found no problems with this pedal and I also expect to have little problems with it in the future. I can say that Boss pedals will take pretty much anything you can throw at them! Actually this pedal must be about 15 years old by now and it is still going strong!

Conclusion
For the money I think this is a very useful pedal. The sound is warm and the controls give you a great deal of flexibility.

I would recommend this pedal to anybody who is looking for a way to fine tune their guitar sound. It is affordable and will be reliable for many years. In all, a very useable pedal!

Thanks for reading!