Hello Gearheads! Welcome back to another fun feature. I’ve been quite busy with other musical and business engagements but am happy to report I’ve got some great new features coming forth. Today, I have the pleasure of showcasing a unique offering from Dirty Boy… The Silver Boy! The Silver Boy is a unique take on circuit design, a groundbreaking analog preamp pedal inspired not by a vintage circuit, but by a virtual amplifier. It’s not a common thing to see an analog device being born from a software plugin! That software would be the Two Notes, Genome platform and the Silver Boy TSM-Ai Amp specifically. I don’t have any personal experience with the software version of this circuit, but I will say that the analog pedal is a very musical and toneful pedal! More on that later…
For anyone who has not heard of Dirty Boy as a brand, they’ve been around for many years and were a constant force in the early boutique pedal market back in the day. Dirty Boy was essentially Blues and Alex Saraceno’s love child of pedal circuits and amplifiers. All the circuits were hand made by Blue’s father Alex and many professionals and gearheads alike loved these pedals. Dirty Boy is now owned and led by Danny Gomez who is taking the brand into new territory and while keeping the brand’s mission alive and well.
““I have done my thing with the Dirty Boy Pedals brand, it’s time for Danny Gomez to take over, ” Blues Saraceno said. “I am looking forward to hearing Danny Gomez do great thing with my father’s sonic legacy.””
The Silver Boy is a really interesting mixture of tones and function. On paper, the name “Silver Boy” suggests it’s a vintage Silvertone amplifier inspired design, a raucous and vibrant american rock tone… but the feature set takes this pedal far beyond that tonality. The most striking feature is the “Variac” simulation control, that allows you to adjust the voltage to the circuit much like how a variac is used with real amplifiers, ala Eddie Van Halen to get a unique saturation in the gain stage. You can really make the pedal as squishy, firm or as juicy as you’d like with this simple knob. Rolled further back, it can gate the tone and you can simulate a broken amp, 60’s psycho fuzz units… crazy sound effects - it’s all there.
The Silver Boy has a simple yet effective tone stack with Treble, Middle and Bass (labeled HI, MD, LO) and a gain and master volume. A lot of gain structures and tones are available with these controls and I explored all of them in my demo below. I personally favored running the Silver Boy as a medium gain device with enough volume to push the front end of my amplifier and setting the variac control to just settle the tone in right… not too firm and not too compressed or soft. You can absolutely get a blatant amount of distortion out this pedal if that’s your thing! I used those higher gain settings for the solo sections of my demo.
“‘SilverBOY was born as code. Now it exists as hardware. It’s the first time we’ve built an analog circuit from a virtual amp — reversing the whole industry’s direction,’ ”
The Silver Boy also has direct and impulse response related features, which is impressive considering the design of the pedal. There’s a stereo line, stereo headphone out, emulated speaker cabinet output as well as the standard preamp input and outputs. There’s ALOT going on here! I used the direct output to my studio’s Cyclops Audio PM1000 preamp with the bass guitar in the forthcoming demo. All the guitars were recorded using the Silver Boy as a standard pedal in front of the amplifiers.
I had a lot of fun checking out this unique pedal, it’s unlike anything I’ve ever tried in it’s feature set and origin and it sounds great… which of course is the most important piece of the puzzle! The Silver Boy is a very amp-like circuit either as a standalone pedal on your board or as a direct solution for recording or listening with headphones.
I urge you to check out more from Danny Gomez and his continuation of pedal history at Dirty Boy. I am hoping to check out the Buzzy Boy next, I remember loving the original fuzz years back when I tried one. The hunt never ends my friends…
https://www.instagram.com/dirtyboypedals/
Until next time Gearheads, please take a moment to Like, Subscribe & Share this Feature and I’ll see you all very soon!