LocoGhoul wrote:A real Dallas Rangemaster treble booster -or "clone"- (not the one which appears in the Brian May booster; it doesn't seem as powerful as the original).
You may well be right. This web page,
https://www.electrosmash.com/dallas-rangemaster, analyzes the "original" Dallas Rangemaster circuit (though I'm sure that, especially given the variability in components back in the day, that there was no given "standard" for original Rangemasters), and concludes that it should have given about 38 dB of boost. Meanwhile, this page,
https://shop.brianmayguitars.co.uk/bmg-electronics/bmg-tb-classic.html, provides a graph of the frequency/boost settings for the hardware pedal on which the Brian May
Treble Booster stomp in AmpliTube is modeled, and that's a 33 dB boost on the "'70s Rangemaster" setting. So a "real" Rangemaster (or, at least, some of them!?) could have been around 5 dB hotter than the Brian May
Treble Booster stomp.
I often run the Brian May
Treble Booster stomp at its '90s EQ setting (centered on 3.4 kHz instead of 12.5 kHz) but with the gain on the '70s setting (i.e. 33 dB) in an effort to get a slightly fuller range boost (which seems to have been a common mod for old Rangemasters) without losing the "treble boost" character. but this often depends on the tone for which I'm going, the amp model with which I am using it, etc. (Sometimes I'll run the same amp model on right and left sides of the stereo, but use a different EQ setting on the Treble Booster stomp to get a slightly different character across the stereo.)
That said, I like the "switchability" in the Brian May
Treble Booster -- but treble boosters were such a huge part of so many classic '70s tones, I'd love to see a new,
additional treble booster stomp
![Mr. Green :mrgreen:](./images/smilies/icon_mrgreen.gif)
with more such options: like, Rangemaster vs. Hornsby Skewes, and/or various Rangemaster mods. (Perhaps an obvious one is that which the Laney Black Country Customs TI-Boost pedal itself tries to reverse engineer; it aims to replicate the effects of Tony Iommi's lost modded Rangemaster -- which seems to have had something extra going on in the low mids -- along with some additional EQ controls.)