BOSS BP-1W BOOSTER/PREAMP & IR-2 AMP & CABINET £259 & £179
What You Need To Know 1 We haven’t seen a new Boss compact here for a while…
And then, like buses, two come at once! These were both released in late 2023.
2 One looks more complicated than the other.
That’s right, the Waza Craft BP-1W is a pretty straightforward booster and preamp pedal, while the IR-2 is an amp and cabinet emulator that, by necessity, has plenty of knobs and eight sockets compared with the other pedal’s two!
3 Would they both go on my pedalboard, though?
The BP-1, for sure, and the IR-2, possibly – it has many roles, but it could be the last link on your ’board if you want to go straight into a PA, rather than use an amp.
Here’s a pair of Boss compact pedals, which are designed for completely different roles, that could complement each other in a signal chain. The Waza Craft BP-1W boost pedal takes the preamps found in some vintage Boss and Roland gear – the CE-1 Chorus Ensemble and RE-201 Space Echo – and puts them together in one pedal (along with a natural straight boost) that’s designed to give your amp a kick or generally enhance the sound of your signal chain. The other pedal on review here is the IR-2, which takes the amp and speaker emulation facility of Boss’s twin-footswitch IR-200 and makes it available in this compact pedal format.
Boss Boosts
The CE-1 Chorus Ensemble and the RE-201 Space Echo may be long-gone 1970s designs, but they live on – and perhaps not in their original, intended roles. While the CE-1 provided luxurious chorus and vibrato and the RE-201 offered mellifluous tape echoes, those effects were coloured and enhanced by the sound of the preamps in each unit, something that guitarists found that they favoured, at times using the units with the effects bypassed just for the extra that the preamp offered. Here, the new BP-1W uses analogue circuitry to recreate the sound of those two preamps, delivering them via Level and Gain knobs. You choose your preamp from a three-way toggle switch, and the central (NAT) position offers a natural transparent sound if you prefer to dial in a boost without the added colour. You also get the choice of two buffers: Standard and the slightly warmer‑toned Vintage.
The Level knob dials up the output volume with plenty of capacity for substantial boost, while a Gain knob adds in some dirt – and between the two of them you can set up your favoured tone, mixing a sufficient amount of volume with a dash of grit. When the Gain knob is maxed, it can actually add in quite an amount of drive/ distortion, but that varies and is dependent on which of the three settings you’re using, with the CE setting getting the most distorted. That crunch is there to be called upon, but we preferred the sweet spots
to be found further back on the dial. The RE and CE settings both add in a little extra midrange compared with the NAT sound, just right for adding a little girth. However, both have their own character, the RE being softer/warmer in the top-end with more subdued transients to the CE’s glassier top and clarity in pick attack. All three voices work brilliantly, providing plenty to give your amp a kick, bolster the sound of other dirt pedals or just generally providing that ‘more’ factor.
Rig In A Box
Plenty of players have got used to working without amps these days, with the consistent quality of sound and sheer convenience of digital winning out in many situations. If we’re talking convenience, few modellers come close to the practicality of this new IR-2 – the amount of functionality Boss has packed into a Compact series pedal is just staggering.
What you’re getting here is a pedal that can supply the signature sound of 11 different amp types – a mix of some named favourites and some more generic Boss creations – each of which with an associated cab IR from Celestion Digital, although you can load alternative IRs into the pedal using the free, dedicated IR-2 IR Loader app for Mac OS and Windows. Each amp can be adjusted with Level, Gain, Middle, Treble and Bass knobs, and an ambience knob adds in a choice of either Room, Hall or Plate Reverb. Connection is via a mono input with a choice of mono or stereo output, and there’s also a mono or stereo send and return loop so that you can bring other pedals into the signal path after the amp emulation.
While the default option is connection to a line-level device, there is a range of options for calibrating the IR-2 for
The go-anywhere IR-2 might just be the most practical possible addition to your gear setup
optimum use with different amps. For a bit of silent practice, there’s also a minijack stereo headphone socket. Besides loading IRs, a USB input allows the pedal to function as an audio interface so you can easily connect to a DAW for recording.
The amps are tactile to play through, nicely dynamic and react well to boost pedals placed in front, making a combination of IR-2 and BP-1W a practical proposition. The 11 amps have been chosen to cover a range of musical genres, and the named models (Fender Twin and Bassman, Vox AC-30, Marshall ‘Plexi’, Soldano SLO-100 and Mesa/Boogie Rectifier) would probably be enough for many players. However, there are also some really good tones delivered by the proprietary models as Boss uses its Multi-Dimensional Processing (MDP) to positive effect for crunch and high-gain sounds that retain great string clarity. These models are useful for live scenarios because you get instant access to two channels, each with a different amp or the same amp with altered settings (perhaps more gain), which are toggled between with the footswitch (a press and hold is needed for bypass). There’s also a provision to add an external footswitch for the channel switching.
If you don’t want amp and cab together then you’re able to turn the other on or off. For example, you may wish to turn the cab off so you can use an amp’s sound as a drive pedal in front of your amp, or perhaps use the Celestion IRs to complement another favoured amp‑in-a-box pedal.
Verdict
The BP-1W is a quality tone conditioner to have in front of your amp, while the IR-2 might just be the most practical possible addition to your gear setup. The fact that it has so many uses and is a go-anywhere pedal that will run from battery power makes it a versatile problem solver that could be the perfect choice to sling into a spare gigbag pocket or have on your pedalboard ready to be brought into action when the need arises. Couple it with the BP-1W to add switchable gain-changing options and you’ve got a truly portable rig that’ll get you through many scenarios.