I priced these LOW for players worldwide to give back for all of the love and support of CHASE TONE® for decades now! I hope you enjoy this vintage boost as much as I do!
~CHASE TONE® SECRET T. BOOSTER™~
If you love the CHASE TONE® SECRET PREAMP® for vintage iconic 1970s Echoplex preamp tones, you’ll love the Secret T. Booster for vintage-elusive 1960s & 1970s boost tones. Also incredible for vintage Rockabilly in both tone and feel giving that Gretsch-y Twang to a Gibson.
Designed as both a boost for the iconic SECRET PREAMP® or for iconic use on its own. This one is all about pure vintage iconic tone. There’s nothing like it once you actually hear it in your rig. The custom made transistors give it that extra 5%.
Easy Order Details: SPECIAL PRICING! $99.98! US State Sales Tax May Apply
CHASE TONE® Players Before Profits® pricing!
USA Shipments Only through Shopping Cart: $10 USPS Ground Advantage Mail w/Tracking. 5 to 10 Business Days for Delivery from Shipment Date. (Actual shipping costs.)
INTERNATIONAL: Please contact us directly for invoicing!
CANADA: $35 USPS First Class Mail w/TRACKING. Delivery around 5 to 10 business days or less once shipped. Customs may add additional wait times.
ASIA/AUSTRALIA: $35 UPS Expedited w/TRACKING. Delivery around 3 to 5 business days or less once shipped. Customs may add additional wait times. (Actual shipping costs)
30 Day Satisfaction Guarantee for USA Buyers. Absolutely Guaranteed.
☆ 5% purchase price discount for United States Veterans with FREE USA SHIPPING! ☆ (Please contact us below!)
EUROPE: Shipments Coming Back Soon! Please do not order if you are in Europe but please contact us below to get on the wait list.
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These are hand coated in a special order 1960s style BRITISH SILVER HAMMERTONE FINISH w/a slight BLUE HUE! Then Silk Screened by hand one-by-one w/TRUE BLACK INK! Then oven baked. Fine-tuned w/Custom Made Silicon Transistors for a silky top end & hand selected vintage style ceramic capacitors for clarity. The end result is just like 1960s England ‘British Blues era’ in look, tone & feel!
These have been made for decades through custom shop work, now being brought into limited production for players worldwide. Pricing is currently low for all to enjoy. THE TONE BELONGS TO EVERYONE.™
In addition to using it as a vintage 1960s & 1970s secret boost, pairing the SECRET PREAMP® and SECRET T. BOOSTER™ together emulates the classic setup of Treble Booster into Echoplex Preamp that even the Who’s Who of Rock’s Royalty forgot all about! This combination is the soaring, rock orchestrations we all grew up on hearing in our youth and has been long forgotten. Bohemian Rhapsody and more…the missing link in the signal chain where the notes just envelope into feedback even at low volumes.
Select Material Ceramic capacitors that have a natural vibration when voltage is applied much like an airy 1959 – 1960 Gibson Les Paul PAF pickup response.
Custom Made Silicon Transistors for a Silky Top End ‘HEAVEN TONE’.
Authentic “treble warmth” with higher notes on the fretboard distorting more the further up the neck the notes are played allowing solos iconically sing.
None of the ear piercing treble & none of the noise and temperature instability of the germanium varieties.
Bend strings like the old British Blues w/’dynamic compression’enveloping into singing, iconic clean overdriven tones.
Historical & User Manual Info Below!
A little history…
Where British Rock Was Born
In 1960s London, a deceptively simple device would iconically reshape the sound of rock and roll. Not a distortion pedal in the modern sense — but a midrange & treble-focused signal booster, designed to cut through the murky low-end response of tube amplifiers and coax them into singing with clarity and harmonic richness. Built around a single transistor, the circuit is elegantly minimal: a handful of components, a 9-volt battery, and a single control knob. Yet in the right hands, it may be one of the most consequential pieces of gear in your electric guitar history.
The Sound That Defines an Era
This circuit finds its iconic home in the rigs of pro players amplifying searing British blues driven tones into glorious, compressed emotional overdrive & brilliant natural wood instrument cleans. It doesn’t just boost the signal — it draws closer the relationship between the player, guitar and amplifier into something greater than the sum of its parts.
Simplicity, Scarcity, and the Cult of the Original
What makes the sound so revered — and so difficult to replicate faithfully — is the simplicity of its analog design. There’s barely anything between your guitar and amplifier, unlike the modern highly processed signals that have come to dominate. Simple vintage circuits allow each wood instrument to sing with its own character, frequency response, gain profile… its own voice. Vintage prized pieces are now rare artifacts, commanding serious collector prices and inspiring decades of electric guitarists striving to recreate what has been lost to time. The pursuit of that elusive treble warmth — that particular compression and harmonic bloom — has driven luthiers, engineers, and tone obsessives mad ever since. An analog boost rooted in minimalist design secretly used to drive amplifiers on records without telling anyone, and that is precisely what makes it immortal.
CONTROLS
BOOST Knob (Custom Fine-Tuned Taper — adjust by ear, not by position)
The Boost knob functions as an interactive EQ and gain modifier with a custom taper designed to shape saturation with a sweeter, more musical top end. Trust your ears here — especially when comparing against other boost pedals.
At lower settings (around noon and below), increased loading shifts the high-pass filter frequency, taming harsh top-end sizzle while cutting loose, thumpy sub-bass. What remains is a focused, warm midrange — the kind heard on the records that defined the era.
Set low for a warm preamp-style effect with that magic touch of vintage recordings. Hear your guitar’s true inherent voice with touch-sensitive response and harmonic detail that rewards how hard you dig in. Particularly expressive with a vintage Gibson ES-335 or Les Paul, using the guitar’s own tone and volume controls to draw out the full range of the instrument and amplifier.
Around 1 o’clock — more top-end bite and midrange punch, pushing into amplifier breakup territory.
Past 1 o’clock, the resistance changes rapidly — opening a high-density cluster of micro-tonal shifts between 1 o’clock and 4 o’clock. This is your highly tunable sweet spot: treble that cuts through without piercing, with varying gain and output levels to match any rig.
Full clockwise — pure, unadulterated roaring overdrive. Use your guitar’s controls to tame the beast.
Tone Tip: The vintage approach is simple — roll back guitar volume for cleans and light drive, roll up for roaring lead tones. No tap dancing required.
Pairs beautifully before the CHASE TONE® SECRET PREAMP® for the ultimate sustaining, singing classic rock overdrive. Or run it before your favorite Bluesbreaker-style pedal.
EQ
Soprano Clef (UP) – Thick, warm midrange focus with a smooth top end and bass cut. Plug in and play — requires minimal guitar volume or tone adjustments. Treble warmth for both Gibson and Fender guitars.
Treble Clef (CENTER) – The stock mid-1960s British boost heard on countless recordings. Musical top-end bite that cuts through the mix. Carefully fine-tuned to capture the original feel and tone of the era — vintage-authentic to the era. Think: Blues Breakers with Eric Clapton, 1966.
Bass Clef (DOWN) – “What If” Mode Full-range boost with only a slight bass cut due to vintage 1950s-1960s style Half Dollar Sized Ceramic Capacitor much like the vintage Fender Stratocasters used. The capacitance varies with voltage giving a dynamic feel to the wound strings since the circuit is now not cutting as much bass. Allows the amplifier to clip on hard pick attacks even at low volume, unlocking tones that never existed before — while still honoring the iconic vintage character at its core. This setting benefits from utilizing the guitar volume controls slightly rolled back especially on Gibsons. For the first time, you’ll hear the full range clarity of your individual precious Gibson & Fender instrument.
SPECS
Power Standard 9VDC center-negative or 9V battery. No reverse polarity required.
Enclosure High-quality 1970s-style aluminum — 4.4″ L × 2.4″ W × 1.5″ H. Fits in the palm of your hand.
Jacks Rear-mount Switchcraft jacks, hand-wired for road reliability. Fits virtually any pedalboard layout.
Switching High-quality epoxy-reinforced 3PDT true bypass.
PCB Professional low-noise design with full ground plane for enhanced noise rejection.
COMPONENTS
Expensive Half Dollar 1950s/1960s Spec Ceramic Capacitors- Vintage Clarity!
Capacitors: Vintage-spec new-production ceramic disc capacitors — chosen specifically for the original ’60s and ’70s circuit’s tonal character. After nearly 30 years of building, I can usually tell the sound of a capacitor by holding it in my hands. The capacitor choice can be everything. Ceramic preserves the natural low-frequency and midrange spectrum of the instrument without coloring or garbling the signal. In an A/B comparison, the difference is immediately audible in the top end — an airy, clear tone that responds beautifully to guitar volume rollback. The artists I work with consistently reach for this character when chasing the elusive tones of the vintage recordings they grew up on allowing them to milk the natural tones out of their guitar by working the controls.
Transistors: 1960s/70s-style hand-selected, cherry-picked, custom made silicon transistors — modified and voiced to iconically capture the sound and feel of the era’s recordings. Low noise, temperature stable, and free from the instability and cost issues of original germanium units.
Includes an analog trick of simulating germanium collector-to-base leakage current feel — delivering natural compression and pickup loading that eases off as you roll back the guitar volume, revealing the full texture of the fretboard and the wood beneath the strings.
Resistors: New-production carbon film resistors fine-tuned to accurate vintage spec values — capturing the tonal qualities of vintage resistors with the consistency and lower noise floor of modern film construction. Much has been debated in gear circles about our use of aged carbon film resistors. What’s lost in our past translations is the vintage gear we’ve had go through our hands rarely ever, if ever, match up to vintage schematics. The resistors regularly measure quite high in value (100Ks often measure 108K to 114K on average with some ceramic varieties used in 1960s England measuring 140K to 160K for example) and capacitors often measure lower especially silvered ceramic capacitors while ceramic disc capacitors much higher.
Indicator Retro impact-resistant red LED bezel. Wide viewing angle.
Player Tone Tips:
The vintage approach needs no channel switching.Roll back your guitar’s volume for clean, woody tones — roll it up for natural overdrive. It’s that simple, and that musical.
Ideal for slide players: dial in a clean rhythm tone rolling back the guitar volume for traditional chords, then push the guitar volume for singing lead glass slide solo overdrive. Or use your Gibson’s pickup selector as an instant channel switch — neck pickup preset for cleans, bridge pickup for immediate grit.
Placement matters. Position the Secret T. Booster near first in your signal chain, before any buffers, (experiment before or after Fuzz Face style pedals) to preserve the full dynamic interaction between the pedal and your guitar’s controls via the low input impedance which warms the signal.
On the Boost knob: lower settings yield fatter, warmer character by design. There’s no need to push the top end if the music doesn’t call for it. Color the sound without the boost.
The Secret T. Booster is voiced around the iconic frequencies of the ’60s and ’70s — the tones that defined the records. Explore alternate tunings to unlock new dimensions: Drop D, or drop the A string to G. Try Both at the same time. This pedal rewards experimentation.
Rolling back a Fender’s volume control yields chewy, twangy vintage tones due to the vintage low input impedance and custom tuned circuitry.
