One effect I never fully understood was the treble booster. I knew Brian May and Stevie Ray Vaughan used them but I didn't know a myriad of other guitarists such as Tony Iommi and Warren Haynes use them as well. After watching Warren Haynes' rig rundown (again) I took notice of the Cesar Diaz built Texas Ranger he had hidden away in his effects rack. After a few days of pondering I figured I may as well throw one more project on the to do list. Luckily for me treble boosters are fairly simple to build, and it seemed as though I already had everything I needed to build one. I originally wanted to build a Diaz Texas Ranger clone, but I didn't have a rotary switch for the selectable input cap feature so I decided to start looking for something else.
The most popular option seemed to be Catalinbread's Naga Viper, so I found the layout on tagboard effects (where I get almost all of the layouts for my builds) and started my journey. The Naga Viper has an additional gain and tone control (called heat and range respectively) along with the boost control, which sounded like features I would never actually use, but I built the pedal with these features just to rule them in or out. I didn't want to build a straight clone of the Naga Viper so I took a few liberties such as socketing the transistor to see which of the ones I had sounded the best, finally settling on a BC548. I also put in a toggle switch to switch between a 5nf and a 100nf input capacitor, mimicking the highest and lowest options of the Diaz Texas Ranger, which I later removed because I felt it really just muddied everything up, leaving the 5nf in as the main input cap.
After a week or so of testing I decided to remove the tone control, but without it or the input capacitor switch I felt the build was now missing a way to thicken it up. Even though I didn't like the tone control there was none of the mud that the input cap switch seemed to introduce, but it did give it a thicker, somewhat fuzzy edge that I kind of liked. In place of the potentiometer I used a toggle switch to close or open the place where the potentiometer once was, which gave me both extremes of the tone control's range. This suited me perfectly. Once all was said and done I decided to keep the gain control as it turned out to be quite useful in taming some of the girth when the tone switch is in the thickest position.
I normally question how closely all my other builds sound to the originals they were inspired by, but since this build was inspired by both the Diaz Texas Ranger and the Naga Viper, plus I did some slight mods, I'm not sure how it would compare. Since it only has a few components it could either sound very similar or not at all, but either way I'm fairly happy with how it turned out. I've named this build the Texas Rattler, borrowing from the Texas Ranger and the viper part of Naga Viper. The controls are Hiss (boost), Heat (gain) and Humidity (Low/High tone switch). This build has not only inspired confidence to explore ways to adjust a build to my needs, but also I like to think I've learned more about what a treble booster does and why some of the greats have used them throughout their careers. I swear I didn't want to build this many guitar pedals in 2022, but I'm glad I chose to build this one.
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