I had one of these pedals about 1 1/2 years ago. I changed some gear around and got rid of the DS-1. I proceded to kick myself until today, when I finally got another one. This pedal, while cheap ($) and "bottom line", is a wonderful gem. Don't let the low price and bottom-rung "beginner" idea fool you. I've been playing for close to 20 years and have heard a lot of distortion pedals. This is the best distortion I have ever come across relative to my personal taste. It is the most dynamic distortion I have ever used - roll back the volume on your GUITAR and the distortion cleans up nice. Then, turn that volume back up and wail again! Very responsive pedal, more so than some of the more expensive ones. I use this with an American Strat and an Epi Les Paul either into my Fender HR Deluxe or direct into a Floor POD Plus (sounds better than the Line 6's distortion, in my opinion) This pedal sounds great with solid-state or tube and plays nicely with other effects, like wah and delay. Give it a chance. For the low price tag you can't lose.

This pedal has a great tone, small volume leap, (which is good if your going from clean to distorted) and has the perfect distortion that i have yet to duplicate on my Boss ME-50. (I'm sure it can, I just haven't messed with it enough) The only problem is, it has one good setting, which is crunchy/rock/metal/alt/punk. So set it up, and you have an average distortion for just about any song that might need distorting, so long as it's not too heavy. It even sounds good with tube amps. Only downside is adjust it once, and that's the best you're going to get out of it. I wrote my settings on it in sharpie because i knew they weren't going to need adjusting. Great for 1-2 years of experience and a low budget.

I have been searching for a good petal for so long and tried them all out. I had to return so many due to lack of headroom and picking response, metal core, metal monster, Uber metal, you name it and i returned it. The DS-1 is great for heavy metal you get such an organic sounding distortion and it excells when pushed hard. the highs cut though well and the mids jump out at you. the only down is that I play in drop C and the lows can get a bit muddy, but I was fortunate to find a great solution and setup. I run the petal before my amp, put a BBE sonic maximizer and a 10 band eq in the effects loop. My amps petal has an effects loop switch so i can deactivate the loop when I play clean. so in short I can get rid of the little bit of muddyness and now i have a great setup. so if you want organic goodness for a steal of a price go for the DS-1.

The BOSS DS-1 has been a staple of every budding rock musician's rig for years and years now. There are a lot of reasons for this, and these same reasons will keep it in use for years to come.

One reason, this pedal is inexpensive while still maintaining a level of quality and durability not found in many other cheap distortion pedals.

The DS-1's distortion tone is raw and can get very heavy and fuzzy. However, you lose a lot of clarity in the notes played. A young guitarist, especially one without a great command over the fretboard, can mask many poor notes with this veil of fuzz.

For a guitarist just starting out, the DS-1 is the perfect introduction to pedals and external effects. It's a simple pedal, and I encourage beginners to play around with the simple 3 knobs and get creative in the shaping of their distortion tone. This will be SO beneficial later when you start upgrading to better and more expensive pedals and a variety of different effects.

When the DS-1 no longer does it for you, move up to the DS-2 or maybe an overdrive pedal. It's about growing up as a musician, consider the DS-1 elementary school.

So you will have a good point of reference regarding my comments the following are my favorite players and a description of my whole rig. This is important because it's not just the pedal, but what you like and the entire rig from strings, to guitar, to pedal, to amp, to speakers that make up the musical instrument for electric guitar. It’s an electronic ensemble, not just a guitar and a pedal. Change any component and the sound changes. That’s why we use pedals! EVH, Nugent, Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page, Angus Young, and most other top players of that 20 year era are Gods in my opinion. I also like Kirk Hammett of Metallica and some other heavy metal players, so transistor distortion is something I like. I play through a home-made 36 Watt all tube point to point wired amp. It's a push-pull schematic with 4 EL84's on the output and 3 12AX7's in the preamp stages. The amp drives a home-built 4x4 cab loaded with 2 Celestion Vintage 30s and 2 Celestion G12H's. Although a home brew it's a fairly standard setup. The amp can play very clean when turned down and feedback on. It is very much like the old Marshall 18watt but beefier. My guitar is a Fender Strat Hwy 1 that I bought new in 2004 with standard out of the box single coil pickups. I generally use Ernie Ball 10s. Hopefully this will give you an idea of what the whole rig sounds like so you will have an accurate idea of how my description weighs in for this pedal.

Lets’ start with a comparison pedal. I first tried and found the MD-2 pedal to be very well made like my other BOSS pedals. It’s features make it very tunable, but it is for folks who like EXTREME distortion. I mean X-TA-REEEM DISTORTION. Bottom line is BOSS has a good pedal with the MD-2 if you mostly want distortion to the MAX. I could not get it to play mild distortion even with my amp turned down and the volume on the guitar down. It's very important to note this was with the weak output of my single coil Fender pickups. The MD-2 was EXTREMELY distorted in front of my daughter's Ibanez playing through the bridge humbucker. It sounded like a dull chainsaw cutting up a garbage can with live cats inside trying to claw their way out. (Not that I've ever tried that!) For my taste I ended up sending the MD-2 back, swapping for a BOSS DS-1. I'm in bliss now with the DS-1. The DS-1 allows me to clean up in the middle of playing, and get nasty again simply by how rough I strum and pick. At the right settings there is no need to stomp the pedal on and off or adjust guitar volume to transition from clean to that edgey-snappy-nasty-raspy transistor distortion and back again. There is also almost no sacrifice in volume with the right settings. I also found the DS-1 makes good distortion with various cords more easily than it does with single string notes. At max settings the DS-1 gets very nasty if you need that. The price cannot be beat. In my opinion the DS-1 is “The Rock of Gibraltar” when it comes to distortion pedals. I can see why it and many other pedals with the same basic electronic components and schematic have been the de-facto standard in distortion pedals for many years. Other pedals will come and go as they have in the past but the DS-1 and it's close variants will remain. If you don't have one get one. It's a one of the foundational basics. You wont be sorry. Regards...