BSM Finest Treble Booster HS-Custom

The HS is a germanium treble booster from BSM (Meiser Electronics), a German boutique maker. Unfortunately Bernd C. Meiser passed away in July 2024 and according to the company's website the BSM company is closed and there will be no business succession. The pedal is a reissue of the Hornby-Skewes treble booster, a short-lived British unit from the late 1960s that Ritchie Blackmore of Deep Purple used on records like Deep Purple In Rock. It’s built with the same type of rare OC44 germanium transistors as the original. It is designed to be placed between the guitar and the amp, not in the effects loop. The tone comes from the interaction of pickups, booster and amp, so it works best into a vintage-style amp pushed hard. The pedal is built for single-coil pickups with fairly low inductance (Fender, Rickenbacker, Burns or Vox style). With the guitar’s volume rolled back you get a crunchy, cleaner tone, and with it turned up fully you get a thick, singing lead sound. The pedal is powered by a 9V battery and has no jack for external power supplies. Due to the nature of the pedal it was practically impossible to capture it via my Lehle P-Split III alone since it generated an excessive hiss. Therefore I used a passive Jack Orman's style pickup impedance simulator box wired after the P-Split and before the pedal. **Controls** The standard HS has no knobs. It has an input, an output and a footswitch. The boost amount is fixed, so you adjust your sound with the guitar’s volume and tone knobs and the amp’s settings. This is part of what makes it feel vintage. The related HS-Custom, which was captured here, adds a volume control, based on a modification Blackmore made himself. I made multiple captures with different positions of the volume knob. Fun fact: I bought the pedal from Frank Steffen Mueller who is a guitar youtuber (@FrankSteffenMueller) and a friendly person. I recommend watching Helmut Bibl's video where he compares the non-custom HS version of this pedal to others (see below).