Introducing the OG-1 a collaboration between Colby and Analogman (Mike and I have been friends for many, many years!)

The OG-1 is a “tribute” overdrive pedal based on the Boss OD-1, one of the first Boss Compact pedals, released in 1977.

Here is what Mike has to say about some of the details……..

The Boss OD-1 is one of the original Boss Compact pedals, released in 1977. It is considered the first "overdrive" pedal, pre-dating the Ibanez TS-808 and the Boss SD-1. The TS-808 took the basic OD-1 design and added a tone control, which Boss borrowed for the SD-1. But the Boss pedals used asymmetric clipping, as they had a patent on it, and Ibanez could not. Asymmetric clipping has a little more volume, edge, and harmonics. 

The OD-1 was one of my favorite pedals back in the late 80s. I learned about them when I was in Japan working as a software engineer, as they were very popular there. When I came back to the USA, I would stop into every music store I could, and found several of them, even NOS, which I often sold back to the Japanese. Mitch Colby was working at Korg/Marshall at the time, and attended the vintage guitar shows in the New York area which I also went to. He sold me an OD-1 and maybe a CE-1 over 30 years ago. So I thought the OD-1 would be a great pedal to collaborate on, and we call it the OG-1 as it's the Original Gangster. 

The early "silver screw" OD-1 used a large quad opamp, with four stages. This Raytheon RC3403ADB was a "ground sensing" opamp. They are hard to find now and sell for about $20 on eBay. They also used another quad opamp in some of these, the NEC uPC4741C. In the BOSS BOOK, they say that they stopped using the big chip because they had some failures. After a few years, Boss changed to a normal 4558 dual opamp with two transistors for the buffers, like a Tube Screamer, and also changed a few capacitor values, all of which hurt the tone IMHO. These specs were used until it was discontinued in 1985. They also used some different clipping diodes in later models.

The early OD-1 used yellow-striped 1S2473 silicon diodes. These clip close to 1 Volt.  This is higher than the normal 1N914/1N4148 diodes used in most pedals.  This partly explains why the early OD-1 sounds better than later one. The use of the 1S2473 diode would have given it a fairly high forward voltage, yielding milder clipping and a relatively substantial output level.  

Our OG-1 is a tribute to the early OD-1, with all the same parts except we have added true bypass. We use actual Boss DRIVE pots and knobs, which we removed and saved when modifying SD-1 pedals. We use an AUDIO taper volume pot, for easier control of the level, so if comparing an old OD-1 and our OG-1, you may have to have the levels set differently. But the sound is the same. We use actual HAMMOND enclosures, with a nice yellow factory finish that is quite close to the OD-1. 

Please go to the Analogman website to order one of these very special pedals.