signal, and that is good. If you happen to be
running more than 18.6 total feet of cable and
all your pedals are true bypass, you’re
experiencing signal loss. You will likely not hear
it if you’re right at 18.6, but if you run long
lengths of cables, you are likely missing a little
bit and don’t even know it.
Luckily for you, every Boss pedal with a
footswitch is “buffered bypass,” which means
there’s a buffer in your signal chain whether you
like it or not. The Metal Zone is not immune to
this treatment—a Metal Zone left in bypass
mode is a more-than-serviceable buffer, and is
likely cheaper than any standalone unit, given
the ready availability of the MT-2. While it may
look a little funny sitting on a jazz pedalboard,
the utility is there, you’re not breaking any
“rules,” and it will do in a pinch.
GATEWAY “DRUG”
If we’re being honest with ourselves, everyone
that gripes about the Metal Zone does so
because they played it and hated it. The key
phrase here is that everyone has played it. And
frankly, if you’re taking the time out of your day
to drum up that Wicker Man meme every time
someone talks about the Metal Zone, it’s safe
to say that you care a lot about pedals.
So, why has everyone played the Metal Zone?
My theory revolves around the idea of Metal
itself, and into what “metal” has evolved since
1991. Allow me to impart a personal anecdote:
when I was growing up, I started my first band
in 1999, and I played drums. Our guitar player
had some crappy no-name practice amp, and
our bass player had something equally gnarly.
We played metal, and though we liked our
sound well enough, it certainly didn’t sound like
12
TONE TALK //
the big burly guitar tone we listened to on
records. We all thought, “what about pedals?”
Our guitar player ordered a Metal Zone, and
the rest was history. As it turns out, o ur and
Boss’s ideas of metal in 1999 and 1990 (likely
the year spent on R&D for the 1991 launch)
respectively, were drastically different.
However, this experience didn’t sour us on
pedals completely—we simply looked for
another one, one whose sounds fell more in line
with our style. We knew pedals were the
answer. The witchery of the effects pedal world
had already begun entrancing us, and we were
powerless to stop it.
It’s not hard to imagine this exact situation
playing out in garages across the country since
1991, as “metal” means so many things to
different people. Metal Zones got many of us
into pedals, and for that, I am thankful.
MUTE SWITCH
For those of you with headstock tuners and
those of you that swap out guitars mid-set, you
know the pain of keeping your guitar signal out
of your amplifier when you’re tuning, talking to
the audience or band members or whatever
else. That said, you could do far worse than a
Boss Metal Zone with the Volume turned all the
way down. Never clank the guitar into the mic
stand ever again in between songs! The
important thing to remember is actually using
it, as this same instructions here could also
apply to using the volume knob on your guitar.
However, a dedicated mute switch allows the
player to unmute and begin playing instantly,
plus using the Metal Zone as a mute still
imparts the pedal’s buffer-y goodness when
turned off.
In Defense of the Boss Metal Zone