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Boss MT-2 Distortion Pedal
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Metal Zone Equipped with a dual gain circuit, the MT-2 provides super-long sustain and heavy mids and lows like a stack of overdriven amps. With three-band EQ, a wide range of distortion textures is at your command.
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Searched Boss MT-2 Distortion Pedal in Reviews
Great for isolated bedroom use, avoid for band situations 
| Ease Of Use |
The pedal is easy to use in so much as the "level" and "dist" dials are fairly self explanatory, volume and gain. However for someone that's never come across an EQ before or understands where the frequency values actually sit in regards to the mix or what you can hear, it might be a bit more confusing.
I always found the sound great metal when in use in an isolated environment, such as a bedroom. For a band situation though the pedal doesn't have the cut in the midrange to satisfy and your instrument may well get lost in the mix.
Being a boss compact the pedal is pretty easy to use in practise, stick a battery in it and stomp on it, attach a lead in one side and out the other, what more do you want.
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| Sound |
I have to echo the sentiments of another reviewer on this board.
This pedal will suit a beginning looking to chug away on guitar in an isolated situation achieving a great "bedroom" guitarist sound. The issues come as previously mentioned when this pedal is used in a band situation where the guitars are supposed to be hitting the mid range of the mix.
I used this pedal as my preamp fed into a fender combo amp for a few years when I was much younger, it's a fun pedal to mess around with creating crunchy sounds that emulate what you can hear coming out of speakers with your favourite band playing. Especially good if you use it on a small combo amp with a single speaker, able to cut out a lot of the mids giving you a decent bedroom sound.
The problem comes when you take the same setup into a band situation and suddenly the guitar disappears into a mess of hiss as the sound fails to cut through. Sure the 4 Band EQ is useful for trying to combat this, but I can't recommend the sound of this pedal in a band environment; something like a DS-1 would be better, or just natural preamp solid state / valve drive created by the amp.
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| Reliability |
Boss pedals have a tendency to be built very solidly indeed, I've never had one go wrong or bits snap/break off of it. For reliability I'd recommend Boss every time.
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| Customer Support |
Never dealt with Boss directly, they make solid stomp box products built with good enough components and tank-like outer casings. You could stomp on this thing 10,000 times and as long as the spring inside survived the rest of the product would operate just fine.
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| Liked about it |
Gave a great "bedroom" sound ideal for a beginner wanting to lock themselves away and dial up a metal sound
Provides a moderate amount of flexibility in the EQ and a dump load of gain
Built solidly and will last
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| Didn't like |
Unsuitable for band style environments if I'm honest, there is much better distortion out there
Controls are often very sensitive, especially on the EQ side, changing a dial a slight bit will alter the sound a lot
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| Overall satisfaction: |
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3.0 |
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Metal
| Ease Of Use |
The MT-2 has a few more controls than your typical distortion pedal, only because it allows you to alter the tone a lot more than other pedals. It has Level, Dist, Low, High, Mid and Mid frequency, and standard 1/4 inch input and outputs. The manual tells you everything about the pedal and it also includes some settings one of which i still use today.
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| Sound |
This pedal has a lot of gain and when pushed it can get a bit noisy. With the tonal controls its possible to get a few different sounds out of it, it can do anything from low distortion to a high gain. I usually have this pedal on the majority of the time as it has a sound that i absolutely love. It will take some time to find a setting that you will like but I'm sure if there is a particular sound you are after this pedal could almost certainly do it.
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| Reliability |
Built like a tank. Never had a problem with it.
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| Liked about it |
The sound
The tonal controls
Simplicity
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| Didn't like |
More output would be good
A bit Pricey
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| Overall satisfaction: |
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3.0 |
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Great for bedrooms, not so much in a band situatio
| Ease Of Use |
The Boss MT-2 Metal Zone pedal is a puzzling beast. At first it seems like a metal heads dream; insane amounts of gain, and the ability to almost violently scoop mids, whilst cranking the bass and treble. But once you start playing with it in a band scenario things get a little tricky.
The EQ controls, which at first look to be nice and simple in theory, are far trickier to set than you would think. All 4 controls are very touchy, and even the slightest knob twiddling can result in drastic changes.
But if you are a bedroom shredder, and just want the brutal scooped sound like you hear on Metallica's "...And Justice for All" this may very well be the pedal for you.
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| Sound |
The MT-2 has an insane amount of gain on tap, and is particularly suited to the heavily scooped metal sounds that can be heard in the previously mentioned Metallica album "...And Justice for All", and most extreme metal genres.
As many would know though, the sorts of settings you might use in the bedroom by yourself is completely different to the settings you may have in a band situation.
Excessively scooping mids, and cranking the bass and treble with high gain in a band scenario results in the guitar being lost in the mix with the bass drum and bass guitar.
And that's where the MT-2 fails. If you are wanting to use this pedal to get these sorts of tones, whilst still being heard clearly in the mix you are going to have your work cut out for you. While it is possible to get the EQ balance right, the MT-2 just doesn't have the same sort of high gain tone you might get from say a Mesa Boogie Dual Rectifier. It pales in comparison to the real thing.
It is possible to get reasonable mid gain tones that can be heard in a band scenario. I used the MT-2 through the clean channel of my Kustom KGA65 amp in a three piece band. Seeing as I was the sole guitar player, and I didn't scoop mids I could could get a reasonable guitar tone for rhythm and lead.
But at the end of the day this is a fairly average pedal. Great for brutal metal sounds in the bedroom, but not so crash hot for nice tone in a band setting, brutal metal or not.
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| Reliability |
It's a Boss pedal, they know how to build solid, rugged, reliable pedals that last. If there is one thing you can trust with a Boss pedal, it's the build quality and reliability.
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| Customer Support |
I haven't had to deal with Boss.
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| Liked about it |
As always, awesome Boss build quality
* Extreme gain available, so plenty of room to dial in just right amount of gain you are after
* 4 band EQ
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| Didn't like |
Very hard to get a GOOD Quality tone out of.
* Extremely nasally if not dialled in carefully.
* Very artificial sounding distortion compared to some other high gain distortion pedals.
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| Overall satisfaction: |
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3.0 |
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Not my cup of tea
| Ease Of Use |
It's fairly easy to use. There are a few more knobs for tone shaping than your typical distortion box but it was not hard to figure out. I assume those purchasing this are looking for something to give them a huge amount of distortion for heavier metal styles. It does that in spades without much effort so decent marks there.
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| Sound |
I may be overly harsh in this regard as I like metal but brutal distortion is not my primary music taste. I got this pedal because my other distortions were more hard rock and I needed something a little "more." I like heavy stuff and this pedal is good at chugging rhythm tones. It's easy to dial in settings that scoop your mids and give you that classic thrash to modern brutal sounds. Where the pedal fails, and this is as much an EQ issue as it is a pedal fault, is that you absolutely get lost in the mix. I could get a pretty good tone when playing by myself, but as soon as I played it with someone else on guitar, I disappeared. I've played in bands with other guys who've had the same problem with this pedal. It's great while you're chugging along, but it drops out on any sort of melody or solo. Those mids are essential to any sort of melody or solo and this pedal just cuts them out. It also gets nasally when you get into the upper register and is thin, again a midrange issue. Try as I could to EQ the pedal around this, I was unable to find a suitable setting that would allow me to keep some of those essential mids. I spent a while with it but eventually got rid of it, not for me.
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| Reliability |
Boss always gets high marks from me for their build quality and this is no exception. That said, I did have some problems after gigging where if I made an adjustment to the outer or inner knob on the EQ, it would inadvertently twist and change the other knob. For example, this made things annoying if you found a setting you liked for the bass but needed to tweak the treble. The rest of the pedal was robust and took any abuse I threw at it.
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| Customer Support |
Not needed
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| Liked about it |
1. It did have gobs of gain and could get as dirty and nasty as you want.
2. Solid build construction.
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| Didn't like |
1. Mids were non-existant. This is typical of brutal metal styles but it makes the pedal very limited.
2. Knobs are tough to adjust after a while, gigging, because the rings don't move independently once they are no longer pristine and new.
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| Overall satisfaction: |
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3.0 |
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It scratches an itch for a while
| Ease Of Use |
This pedal is a cool looking gunmetal colour with a bright orange logo showing it means business from the offset. It's based around boss's three stage gain circuitry like the mega distortion before it, and is a distortion/overdrive and to date is boss' biggest selling pedal. There are Two concentric control knobs and two standard control knobs. The two cocentric knobs are for the eq settings entitled high+low and middle and mid freq. Mid freq actually being a parametric midrange eq. The other two knobs are for level and distortion. The unit is powered either by a 9v battery or a 9vdc supply. After some tinkering its fairly easy to understand how tp use the stomp box so settings to suit what you require should be easy enough.
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| Sound |
Firstly the unit to my ears never sounded great through my amp, my main issue with the effect is that it had very nasal twangy mids. Don't get me wrong in the shop when you try it, it ticks all the boxes. Destructive lows, mid cuts, lower mids boosted, heavy distortion. In reality through a screaming hot valve amp it seems to wreck th creamyness of your hard fought for tone. I sent mine to have the keeley twilight zone mod done to it as this apparently ironed out alot of these issues but it still sounded false and wrong so we parted company. The pedal will almost certainly suit solid state amps better. The pedal seems to caress your ego and patch over the cracks by making you feel like you've got the worlds biggest amp and best guitar when in reality it caress' your ego then feels you leaving used. Its not all bad however as convincing old school thrash tones can be had relativly easily just so long as you are content with a bid range buzz. I personally though would look elsewhere for long term appeal. When compared to some of its peers from t-rex and subdecays blackstar you realise maybe you chose wrong. I'd rather eat my own shoes than buy another one, i'm normally unbiased and fair and i still i am being. i paid my money, paid some more and still loathed it!
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| Reliability |
I'd definatly find it reliable although the concentric pots feel a little flimsy. It is after all a boss pedal and after all boss pedals are very road worthy.
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| Liked about it |
ease of use
colour of theenclosure
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| Didn't like |
nasal midrange tones even when scooped
concentric pots feel weak
impossibly false and processed sounding
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| Overall satisfaction: |
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2.0 |
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Boss MT-2 Distortion Pedal
| Ease Of Use |
Easy to use, pedal has 4 dials and 2 of the dials have 2 extra dials on top of them, so in all 6 dials to set your ideal distortion sound.
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| Sound |
As stated in ease of use there's 6 dials to create the sound your looking for. Also dont be fooled by the pedal name of metal zone, it does much more than just metal, with the 6 dials you can create softer distortion sounds, but it really does deliver for metal. I like the 6 dials as you get all options from low, middle, high frequancies as well as 2 dials dedicated to how much distortion and what level you want it, so loads of settings can be created. I personally use a Peavey amp on clean channel so the pedal does all the distortion setting and I use Ibanez RG/Jem guitars. If your looking to create a Metallica kind of sound then this is a good choice of pedal, but as I said you can really tweak this pedal to do all sorts.
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| Reliability |
Like every Boss pedal, solid metal block thats very durable. If gigging take a spare 9v battery as back up,if you dont use an adapter.
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| Customer Support |
Not had to deal with them.
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| Liked about it |
1) Ease of use
2) Durability
3) That stomp boxes its one tap its on and 1 tap its off.
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| Didn't like |
Nothing not to like about the pedal. Great unit.
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| Overall satisfaction: |
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5.0 |
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internal use: spec24 spec231 spec582
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