Guild Brian May Treble Booster Pedals

Guild famously made Brian May signature guitars, first in the mid 1980s (they weren’t quite good enough for Brian May purists even if Brian himself did use one in a music video), and then again in the 1990s with better results. Guild also released treble booster pedals to accompany those guitars, the red one on the left being from the 1980s, and the silver one on the right from the 1990s, both of which are a bit uncommon. In this longer-than-normal article I tear them both apart in order to let you know what the deal is with these rare pedals. 

1980s Guild Brian May Power Booster Pedal

The first example we’re going to look at is this red pedal from 1986. This particular example is a bit worn as you can see from the rust on the input and output jack and the obvious wear marks on the body of the pedal, but it showed up for sale when I was looking for one so now it’s mine.

The knobs that came to me on this pedal were unmarked except for a simple line on the top of each. From what I can gather these were not original because all the other pics I could find of this pedal have the same knobs used on the master volumes of many Guild electric guitars from the ’70s and ’80s, an example of which can be seen here in this Reverb ad. Since I have such a limited sample size, I have to assume that the knobs on my pedal were the result of someone swapping the knobs in order to sell them on eBay since those mini knobs could be worth a pretty penny.

In fact, those knobs are so elusive that I couldn’t find any myself, so I decided to try and improvise. Currently (2019), Guild sells a version of those master volume knobs that are designed to work on import Newark Street guitars and as such don’t fit on vintage Guilds. I bought a set of new new knobs and figured I’d have to work some magic to make them work. Much to my surprise, the Newark Street knobs fit just fine, so if you’ve got one of these pedals and need a new knob, now you know that there’s an option even if they don’t look quite as good as ’80s master volume knobs.

Internally, this pedal looks like many pedals from the ’80s right down to the 30-year-old deteriorated foam that turned to dust when I touched it. It makes me sad to remove stuff like that, but I needed to take pics and with the foam rotted like that there was risk of electrical contact between the board and the case, so it got replaced with a modern equivalent which definitely was not a folded-up paper towel sheet because that would be dumb.

There are no marks inside the case on the example in my possession and the battery (a standard 9V) floats loose in the case just begging for more foam or other insulating material (which I also added before closing and which also was definitely not folded paper towel). Thanks to the sleuths on the LetsTalkGuild forum, I have now seen other examples of this pedal such as this one from this page that showed a Bud Industries from Willoughby Ohio logo inside the case making me wonder if mine is an earlier (or later) model. Curious to learn about who actually made the pedals since Guild usually partnered with other companies for electronics, I emailed Bud Industries. Unfortunately, I got no response so after about a month so I gave up. If I do hear back from them with interesting results I will make sure to update this space.

The circuit layout is amazingly simple and since this pedal hasn’t been made for decades (and the version of the Guild company that made it no longer exists) I have no qualms about showing it in detail. Anything you see that might look like scorch marks is nothing more that rotted foam stuck to the components, all of which are in excellent condition.

There is really nothing terribly special about this pedal from an electronics point of view, especially given the fact that so many years have passed since it was released. As we’ll see, treble boosters of this era weren’t known for their noise-free operation, and there are many newer such devices that are quieter, but as I did more research into this pedal I discovered something that made me consider it with new appreciation.

Compared with some of the modern stuff out there this almost looks like it was done in someone’s garage, but you have to remember that 1985 (as mid-’80s as you can get) is closer in time to the 1969 moon landing (16 years) then is to 2019 smart phones (34 years). Holy crap: even I didn’t realize how long ago that was until I did the math. Now I feel old. Oh, and the faded printing on the upper left of the back of that board is TB1 which I assume is short for Treble Booster 1. You can see this more clearly on this image from this page. I found this interesting since the pedal is named a Power Booster by Guild, but rest assured: this is a treble booster pedal.

To give you a feeling for the time when this pedal was new, some of the top albums were Prince’s Purple Rain, Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the USA, Madonna’s Like a Virgin, the soundtrack from Beverly Hills Cop, and, dammit, now I feel even older. At any rate, there is an interesting discussion about this pedal here where an enterprising user drew the included schematic based on pictures of the board from another user.

One thing to note about this pedal is that there is no LED to indicate that it’s powered on. I found that kind of odd, but maybe they were trying to keep costs down or something. Maybe they thought the pedal was worthy of being an always-on type of solution, but if that were the case, why include an on/off button? At this point down the logic tree I arrived at the point that is best described as: Eh – it was the ’80s. Then I figured out the pedal’s ultimate origins which explained some things.

I spent a lot of time  (too much, really) trying to figure out what the story of this pedal’s design was and I found almost exactly nothing. The Guild company that made this pedal no longer exists, having been bought and sold too many times since then, and I could not find information about it from my usual sources. Two things things threw me off the chase: the stomp switch and the knobs, both of which are an alteration to the original design that I believe was used as the bases for this pedal.

After staring at the schematics and talking to an electrical engineer I have come to believe that this pedal is a clone of the original Pete Cornish TB83 treble booster. The original was used by Brian May for years and is shown in this picture from Pete Cornish’s website (which has some great historical Brian May gear stuff to read about). Although I couldn’t find any proof of this being a TB83 clone, Guild advertised the pedal as the “Power Booster as used by Brian”, which at the time was the Cornish TB83 in the picture with the word “Fireplace” (one of Brian’s nicknames for his guitar) written on it.

Now, I should point out that the TB83 has no knobs, so that was an addition by Guild or whoever built the pedal for Guild, but when we get down to the ’90s version of the pedal you’ll see that the entire second stage of that pedal’s circuit is almost a clone of this pedal’s design. I don’t think that’s a coincidence, and I have proof of that pedal’s circuit provenance.

The 1986 price list which is a scant 33 years old and means that the soundtrack from Miami Vice was on the charts (groan) when it was current (but so was Van Halen’s 5150) shows this pedal as having a retail price of $100 and is listed under the $1200 BHM-1 Brian May signature guitar. That guitar, for what it’s worth, is listed at just over $400 over the next-most expensive electric guitars on the list, the Aviator, Setzer Bluesbird, and Roy Buchanan T-200, all of which retailed for $799 that year.

This pedal does show up in the 1986 catalog, but only as an insert into the picture of the Brian May guitar. If you zoom into that picture you can see the original master-volume type knobs on the it, which further indicates to me that mine had been ravaged like King Tut’s tomb for the fine spoils of plunder that were no doubt attained when the original knobs were sold. Or something. Look, some jerk sold my knobs.

Actually, that may not be entirely true. You see, the original master volume knobs used on this pedal are set-screw knobs, meaning that they have a little screw on the side that sets them onto a sold shaft that usually has one flat side for just such a purpose. The pots in this pedal have split shafts which are designed for push-on knobs. Using set-screw knobs on a split-shaft pot is rarely a good idea and it’s possible that one of both of the original knobs were lost over time due to improper fit. For those of you who are thinking that the pots were replaced along with the knobs, the pots in this pedal both date to the 18th week of 1982, so I think they’re original. My guess is that some marketing person demanded to use the Guild knobs no matter the details because that’s how executives generally think.

This pedal is old-school true bypass which means that the electronics are completely removed from the circuit when the pedal is off, using a simple DPDT switch to accomplish this. The downside of this design is that the pedal can (and sometimes does) pop when the switch is stomped either on or off. The benefit is a lack of tone-suck when off and the fact that the pedal works fine without the battery so long as it’s in the bypass mode.

This pedal does not have ability to be powered externally so bring a screwdriver and spare batteries if you’re using this on a gig, though thanks to the bypass design, should the battery die while playing you could turn it off and continue with the show which is something that can’t be said for the Cornish TB83. I should note that the Pete Cornish website claims that the TB83 it will run for up to 500 hours of continuous use so I’d expect similar performance from this pedal.

Pete Cornish pedals are pretty highly regarded (and priced), so I was kind of surprised to come to the conclusion that I did, but there’s more to a pedal than the circuit board and Pete Cornish is well known in the industry for making bullet-proof tour-ready pedals with special attention paid to eliminating noise. I’m also unclear on the legality of Guild making these pedals which makes me wonder if that’s why the pedal was called a Power Booster and not a Treble Booster. Unless some new information comes to my attention, for now that remains a mystery.

Keep reading for details on the ’90s Guild Brian May pedal, or if you’re only interested in the ’80s pedal, scroll down for sound samples.

1990s Guild Brian May Pedal

This pedal, sometimes referred to as the BHM2 (which I have not been able to find in documentation) is downright boring compared to the earlier model, at least cosmetically. Internally it’s a bit more exciting, but we’ll get to that in a minute. This pedal does sport an LED, though it is pretty dim which is almost refreshing in the modern world full of blinding super-bright indicators.

This pedal is a large unpainted box with a single knob and stomp switch. I mean, how many production pedals do you see that aren’t even painted? Most vendors at least tried to associate colors with pedal types but this looks like a kit pedal made in someone’s kitchen, and I say that as someone who’s built a fair number of pedals in my kitchen.

I managed to get in contact with the person who designed this pedal who told me that it was meant to look hand-made which is why it wasn’t painted. Before we continue I’d like to point out that my observation of it looking like it was built in someone’s kitchen was spot-on, so I’m going to go reward myself with a cookie. Oh, and you know who else uses mostly unpainted enclosures for his pedals? Pete Cornish. Coincidence? I think not.

Upon opening the pedal enclosure I was greeted with foam and cardboard, and I have to say that the foam was in much better condition than the foam that I found in the ’80s Power Booster pedal. I don’t know if the cardboard was original, but it certainly did the job of insulating the electronics from the case with practically zero cost, so that works for me even better than paper towels (not that I’d ever do that). The battery was also surrounded by a piece of folded cardboard so that it didn’t move around. Things got interesting when I tried to see the other side of the circuit board, and by “interesting” I mean “Wow, it’s a Friday night and I’m home in the dark taking a 25-year old guitar pedal apart” level of interesting, so temper your excitement. Or not. I’m not here to judge what excites you.

With the ’80s pedal, I could just gently pull on the board and it would lift up because the only thing securing it was the wires connecting it to the jacks and pots. That was not the case with this pedal. Since I didn’t want to risk breaking anything, I dismantled the entire assembly and removed it all as one single unit. That was a bit nerve-wracking because the LED is not wired to the rest of the circuit with wires so much as soldered directly to the board and then to a resistor that was soldered to the stomp switch. That part of the pedal reminded me of old point-to-point amplifiers and it made moving everything a fairly delicate procedure because I didn’t want to break the connections and have to resolder any mistakes I might have made.

As it would turn out, I did manage to break a connection but it had nothing to do with the LED. In this next picture you can see a black wire to the right – a black wire that was soldered (with a terrible cold solder joint I might add) to the lock washer inside the stomp button. There were actually a fair number of questionable solder joints in the pedal, but that’s a build thing more than a design thing and seeing as how the pedal stayed operational for decades until I got my ham-fisted mitts on it, I guess it’s a GAD thing after all.

Oh, and the reasons that I couldn’t lift the circuit board up from the enclosure without dismantling everything were two-fold. First, that direct-attached LED was problematic, but more to the point the single potentiometer was glued to a piece of white foam board which was also glued to the circuit board on the other side.

After some firm yet gentle pulling I managed to get the white board off so that I could examine the underside of the printed circuit board. After looking at the pictures I noticed a logo on the bottom left corder that I originally thought said, Randali. After trying to figure out that weird company that might have been it hit me that the pedal was designed by Randall and the right-most part of the last L in RANDALL had been hidden by a solder trace. As a bit of history, Randall was a sister company to Guild under US Music in the ’90s. I now had a clue about who I could talk to about the pedal’s design.

After I published my review of the Guild G300 Tamarack amplifier and the entire Timberline line of amps, I was contacted by Kevin Nelson who was the Director of Engineering for Randall when these amps were built. Kevin, who is now the owner of Gizmoe Amplifiers, was kind enough to answer my many questions via email about this pedal.

In the mid-’90s, Brian May brought his treble booster pedal to Guild so they could produce a pedal that would allow players of his signature guitar to sound just like him. My conclusion is that this pedal is basically a clone of Brian’s pedal which was probably the prototype used for the TB83 Extra models that would later be sold by Pete Cornish. Kevin described the unmarked pedal given him by Brian May (who he described as “a very nice gentleman”) as “obviously hand made”. He also said that he had no knowledge of the business arrangements between Pete Cornish and Brian May, so he couldn’t tell me anything about that.

When I asked about the components and if they were a direct match to the original, he replied that they were “mid-grade” components of the same type used then in Randall amps, and that the transistors were different because the UK-sourced parts from the original were not easily available to Randall at the time and so were substituted with US parts. He went on to say that no one who demoed the pedal could hear a difference between the Guild and the original, and with Brian May being one of those testers (I assume), it had to sound right.

Unfortunately, I was unable to source an actual schematic for this pedal but I did find one online. This schematic was done by a guy who publishes them after reverse engineering boutique pedals thus stealing their intellectual property and publishing to the world from outside US Jurisdiction, so I’m not giving him any credit since he didn’t design this pedal, even though I’m sure anyone who spends any time in the DIY pedal-cloning world will instantly know who I’m not talking about. I will say that I showed it to Kevin Nelson (the Guild/Randall designer) who said that it appeared to be accurate and was, in fact, very well drawn.

By the way, remember up in the section on the ’80s pedal that I had clues that led me to believe that it was a clone of the Pete Cornish TB83? The second stage of this ’90s Brian May pedal is an almost exact duplicate of the entire ’80s pedal (the schematic for which is again shown here). If you read about Pete Cornish’s TB83 and TB83 Extra pedals on his website, you’ll see that the TB83 Extra is just the TB83 with an extra buffer stage. It was after figuring out this tidbit of information along with staring for too long at the Pete Cornish pedals that I came to the conclusion that these are both copies of Pete Cornish designs. I guess Guild didn’t want to blatantly copy Pete Cornish’s pedals and then name them something obvious.

This pedal is not true bypass as part of the circuit cannot be removed from the signal path. As a result, if the battery dies the pedal will not pass signal even when switched off (Kevin: The pedal is not true bypass and even when not engaged has a low Z follower circuit ahead of the output jack).  The addition of the buffer was a necessity for Brian May in the ’70s because he was playing a row of Vox AC30s on stage all wired in Parallel which was causing impedance problems which were solved for him by Pete Cornish. Since this pedal, like the ’80s model above, cannot be powered externally, I’d probably want to make sure that I had a fresh battery for each gig since all the music stops when the battery dies.

The benefit of such a design is that you don’t get those annoying pops when stomping on the switch and the pedal does not suffer the tone suck problem that non-buffered pedals can suffer, but it also potentially adds complexity to your signal chain if you have a lot of pedals since some pedals (like fuzzes) don’t take kindly to having buffered pedals in front of them. Of course, if you’re Brian May, then your main problem was driving all those AC30s, which was the problem this pedal was designed to solve.

If you’re Brian May and you’re reading this please contact me. My 18-year-old daughter Colleen loves you, loves your instagram, and especially loves your Hedgehogs. I would be a Dad among dads if I could forward a message from you to her or get a signed pic. She’s not impressed that I have all this Guild stuff with your name on it so I need to up my game. Thanks!

Oh, and that note in the image about using a booster preamp is the only marketing material I was able to find about this pedal, though I use the term marketing material in the loosest sense of the term since it is nothing more than the final note in the manual that came with the 1993 Guild Brian May guitar.

In summary, the ’90s Guild Brian May pedal appears to be another Pete Cornish clone, this time of the TB83 Extra pedal, though having not seen the Pete Cornish variety first-hand, I can’t see that it has the same noise dampening effects that the Cornish pedals are said to have. Those pedals tend to be gooped which is pedal-people parlance for the components being sealed in epoxy or a conformal coating, an example of which can be seen in this image which I snagged from this Reverb ad for a TB83. Gooping is often done in order to prevent cloners from copying pedal designs, though Pete Cornish says it’s there to dampen vibrations and reduce microphonic feedback.

Is the 1990s Guild pedal as good as the Cornish TB83 Extra? I couldn’t say. What I can say is that for as difficult and expensive as it is to get a real Cornish TB83, in my experience it’s even more difficult and expensive to find one of these Guild copies, especially in good condition. That’s kind of crazy, but then we Guild collectors are a wacky bunch.

Sound Samples

In order to put these pedals through their paces I pulled out one of my Guild Brian May guitars. Yes, I have more than one (an ’85 and a ’93). Brian May gets his tone on stage through the use of a trio of vintage customized Vox AC30s and I don’t have the funds for that kind of rig mostly due to the fact that I have two Guild Brian May guitars. I also gave up lugging big amps around in favor of using an Axe-FX through a PA speaker. Sure, it’s not quite the same as a rig full of vintage gear, but then it’s a whole lot easier for me to manage and record, not to mention carry when the need arises. Also the coins in that pic are actual vintage sixpense coins because that’s the level of madness you start to obtain when you get into researching tone. I will not be using those for these tests because as much as they can absolutely help to nail the Brian May vibe for some songs, that’s not what we’re here for.

Remember, this Brian May guitar has Seymour Duncan built clones of the original pickups, and like the original Red Special, they are wired in series. Two of the magic tones on the guitar are with the first two or last two pickups enabled and in-phase, so that’s where I did most of my testing.

The Axe-FX III comes with a patch called Bohemian Rhapsody which isn’t bad, but it doesn’t help me here with what I’m trying to do which is to show what effect these Guild pedals have, so I took that patch and bypassed everything except the amp, which is an old-school Vox class-A AC30.  Technically it’s a model of a Top Boost AC30, but I’ve turned all of the Top Boost stuff off. The cabinet is 2×12 Class-A 30W Blue Mix which is what was used in that patch from the factory. In pics of Brian May’s rigs I’ve noticed that he has the tone knobs all dimed, but for my purposes I left them where they are because, again, the purpose of this exercise is to see what the pedals do and not necessarily how to nail Brian May’s tone. If you’d like to learn more about Brian May’s touring rig, this article is a great read and this Rig Rundown video is even better. As previously mentioned, Pete Cornish’s site has some great historical information as well.

Yes, I know these tests would probably have been more accurate with a real amp but I just didn’t have the right gear at my disposal and wanted to get the review done using what I had.

To summarize, I’ve got my Brian May Guild guitar plugged into a Guild Brian May pedal, which is plugged into my Axe-FX III which is configured to simulate a vintage Vox AC30 with the top boost off and the gain and master volumes both on 10. The speaker I use is a QSC K12 speaker but that’s out of the equation because I’m recording direct to my Mac over USB using Audacity. Whew! OK, let’s see how these pedals perform.

The ’80s Guild Brian May Power Booster

With the pedal cabled up and ready to go I turned it on and came to the first frustration which is what the knobs actually do. The knobs are labeled Gain and Intensity. Gain seems pretty straight forward, and that’s exactly what this knob does: boost or cut the gain. The Intensity knob, though… I mean, what does that even mean in the realm of treble boosters? It doesn’t mean anything; the knob is a volume knob and when you turn it all the way to the left the pedal is silent. I’m not sure why I’d want that on any pedal other than a volume pedal, so I pretty much just left it on maximum the entire time. Rolling it down does lower the hiss that invariably comes with an ’80s treble booster, but at the expense of less creamy overdrive.

Tie Your Mother Down

For the first test I did the intro to Tie Your Mother Down where I quickly discovered that if I dialed the guitar in to sound good without the pedal (around 5) it sounded absolutely horrid with the pedal engaged. The Gain on the pedal was at five at all times, so it’s not like I had the pedal maxed out. When I lowered the guitar down to about two (which itself was a challenge because there are no indicators on the Brian May guitar knobs) then it sounded a bit anemic without the pedal and then great with it engaged.

Killer Queen Off

Killer Queen 5

Killer Queen 10

Switching to the middle and neck pickups, I moved into the beginning of the solo from Killer Queen. This is a different animal because the order of the day here is to max the compression and sustain so the guitar was set on 10. This time, I recorded with the pedal bypassed, with the pedal gain on 5, and then again with the pedal gain on 10 just to show how much hum is heard with the pedal maxed.

Honestly, I found the knobs on the pedal to be pretty useless, which is what I expected given their apparent addition to the circuit. For my ears I left the “intensity” knob on 10 and the gain on 5 and then the pedal seemed usable to me. Though there’s a fair bit of compression in the straight recording, there’s definitely a bit of high-end goodness with the pedal engaged that I think really helps with the desired tone. To be fair, the guitar sounds right to begin with, but the pedal just adds that certain something that makes it better.

The ’90s Guild Brian May Pedal

This pedal is a bit easier to operate with it’s one knob and minimally bright LED (remember, super-bright LEDs weren’t yet a thing in the early ’90s). I would imagine that with its buffer it would behave quite differently on a guitar plugged into it with a long cable, but the longest cable I have is 22 feet so I couldn’t test that properly and I didn’t feel like building a capacitance box because that’s not why we’re here.

Tie Your Mother Down

Again with the single knob left on 5, I played the intro to Tie Your Mother Down and again quickly determined that the guitar needed to be at around 2 for it to work well. Honestly I think I could have rolled either the guitar or the pedal back another notch because it still sounds too overdriven to me when I listen to it. I seem to recall reading that this design will produce 30+ dB of gain which is a lot, so dialing it back probably wouldn’t have hurt.

Killer Queen Off

Killer Queen 5

Killer Queen 10

With the neck and middle pickups back on and the guitar volume on 10, I went back to playing the beginning of the Killer Queen solo.

I don’t know that I hear all that much of a difference between the two pedals, though I think the 90s pedal might just sound a touch sweeter (whatever the hell that even means). I think this pedal would be much more usable in a situation where I needed the buffering being provided and in my small test scenario there just wasn’t any benefit to having it. Also, I pretty clearly fell all over myself on the “pedal on 10” demo but decided to leave it because a) it makes me laugh, and b) you really get to hear the hum with that pedal maxed. Also, it proves that I know more than just the first part of the solo.

Psychologically, I like this pedal better because it’s only got one knob and the two knobs on the ’80s pedal annoy me, but that’s clearly a “me” problem so feel free to disregard that.

Both Pedals Stacked

Pete Cornish says on his website that the TB83 Extra was designed to be placed after the TB83 and actually shows a picture of Brian May’s rig with a TB83 and a TB83 Extra Duplex for a total of three treble boosters. Yikes. After reading that the wheels started turning and I figured, why not? So how did stacking these rare Guild pedals go?

With both of them on the hum was unbearable unless i swapped the phase of the pickups when used in pairs. The problem then was that the tone was so strident that I couldn’t bear to listen to myself play. Honestly, I think the root issue there is that I’m not Brian May. Also stacked treble boosters is really just not a rhythm thing.

Off, 80s, 90s, both

With the guitar set back to the neck and middle pickups on with the volume on 10, I played the same intro to the Killer Queen Solo (are you as tired of hearing it as I am?) first with both pedals bypassed, then with the ’80s pedal on, then with that one off and the ’90s pedal on, and then finally with both of them engaged. You can hear the hum increase as I stack them, and that’s really the downside of using them this way because with the right guitar pickup choices, the tone and sustain are killer. Historically, I think people stacking gain pedals like this is why noise gates were invented.

What About Humbuckers?

Seriously? Aren’t you tired of reading yet? I mean we’re way over 5000 words already and I generally don’t like to go over 2500! OK, fine. I guess everyone doesn’t have a stupidly expensive and rare Brian May guitar to play around with.

Using the exact same rig (both pedals stacked) I took my 2003 Les Paul R7 (Brazillian!) with WCR American Steele pickups and 525k pots, put it on the neck pickup, and tried the same damn Killer Queen solo that I’m so tired of hearing. You know, because if you don’t have a Brian May guitar then you’re bound to have a Brazillian Historic Goldtop lying around.

Tie Your Mother Down

Killer Queen

To try and simulate the sound from the Brian May guitar playing Tie Your Mother Down, I lowered the Les Paul’s bridge pickup volume down to 2 – maybe even 1. The guitar just had too much oomph and it couldn’t really produce the chime I could get from the Brian May guitar. With each of the pedals on individually it wasn’t two bad, but with both on it was just unusable.

With the Killer Queen solo, I put the neck pickup on 10 and went to town. Here, I could hear a touch more compression out of the ’90s pedal, but to be fair my “set them both on 5” method was extremely unscientific, amounting to “turn it all the way and then back it off to half”, so it’s possible that variations in the circuits or even the pot values could account for the difference.

Conclusion

In the end are these pedals worth seeking out? If you’re a nutty Guild collector like me, then absolutely. If you’re a nutty Brian May collector? Maybe. If you’re chasing his tone? Honestly, I’d probably seek out a modern Pete Cornish or Fryer pedal with my preference being towards trying the newer Fryer unit since that’s what Brian himself is using these days. I should note that I have not tried that pedal, and I know that both it and the Pete Cornish models can be hard to get here in the US.

Are these pedals cool collectables? Absolutely. Are they the best thing ever to get a Pete Cornish circuit without paying Pete Cornish prices? Um, no, because these routinely sell for twice what Pete’s charging, and most people complain that those are too expensive. I disagree, but that’s an argument for another time. Also as I was putting the final edits on this article, Pete Cornish announced that he’s now selling a TB83 that’s battery-free (needs external 9v) and comes with a stomp switch and an LED, so that would be a top contender for me as well.

If you like Guild Guitars, be sure to check out all my other Guild articles at GADsGuilds.com.

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One thought on “Guild Brian May Treble Booster Pedals

  1. Hi,
    Thanks for a most entertaining and informative article.
    I have just agreed to purchase a VGC 90’s Guild TB from a UK seller.
    I sold a few of the 90’s BM Guitar and TB combos in the 90’s when they came out. I have a music store in the UK. Amazingly I still know where 2 of them are. The importer back then was David “Dixie” Kidd a great friend of Don Randall.
    It’s interesting how different all the TBs sound not just the Guild one. Rory Gallagher certainly gave Brian May a good tip.
    Anyway thanks again.
    Howard

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