DAN AGOSTO: Hi and welcome to Gearwire.Com. Today we're taking a look at the Boss GE-7 Equalizer. It's a graphic equalizer used to basically get different tonal colors out of your instrument. Let's take a look at it.

All right. Inside the box, we have important notes. Safety, maintenance, that comes with every Boss pedal. We also have their catalog, the 2005 lineup with this pedal, product registration (the postage is paid), and of course the all-important manual: this one folds out like this. It basically just tells you how to connect it up, different settings you can use, and also where the battery would go that's over here.

All right, let's take a look at the pedal. All right, this is a seven-band graphic equalizer. Basically what that means we see we have seven bands of equalization (there's seven of these) and each has their own specific frequency range given up here in the number of Hz, and we also have an output level slider which also helps control the sound. We have our standard 1/4" input and output. We also have an input for a Boss PSA pedal adapter, and just like every Boss single effect pedal, this one comes with a battery built in and it goes right under the toggle switch; all you have to do is unscrew this little guy here, and that's the Boss GE-7 Equalizer out of the box.

All right. We're back and we're taking a look at the GE-7 Equalizer from Boss that's wired and then ready to go. I'm playing with an American Standard Fender Telecaster and that's plugged into a Marshall JCM2000 half stack which is mic'de up with the Shure SM57. Let's take a listen to what we're going to be hearing when the pedal is off.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYS GUITAR THROUGH MARSHALL JCM2000 WITH GE-7 BYPASSED]

All right. I'm going to bring the pedal in.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYS GUITAR THROUGH MARSHALL JCM2000 WITH GE-7 ENGAGED]

So you really don't hear much of a difference at all. That's because all of our bands right now are set to zero, and like I said before this is a seven-band EQ, and each of these control -- you can either add or cut a certain amount of gain in each frequency band. Down here we see the low end, 100 Hz, 200, 400, 800, and then it goes on up to about 1.6 kHz or 1,600 Hz and 3,200, 6.4 thousand, so 6,400. If we would like to add some low end to our sound, we would just raise one of these or two of these, any amount.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYS GUITAR THROUGH MARSHALL JCM2000 WITH GE-7 ENGAGED AND BOOSTS THE LOW FREQUENCY BANDS]

So you can see that adds a good amount of low end. You can also cut the low end

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYS GUITAR THROUGH MARSHALL JCM2000 WITH GE-7 ENGAGED AND CUTS THE LOW FREQUENCY BANDS]

There's also [DAN STRUMS GUITAR] -- you can also control the mid range. A lot of people like to do like a mid range scoop on here so you would just lower somewhere in the 800 range, 1.6 kHz, 400.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYS GUITAR THROUGH MARSHALL JCM2000 WITH GE-7 ENGAGED WITH "SCOOP" SETTING]

You get sort of a hollow sound which a lot of people like. You can also boost these frequencies...

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYS GUITAR THROUGH MARSHALL JCM2000 WITH GE-7 ENGAGED AND BOOSTS MID RANGE BANDS]

...so you can get sort of a more aggressive tone out of it. You can also bring down the high end as well to make it a little duller sort of sound...,

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYS GUITAR THROUGH MARSHALL JCM2000 WITH GE-7 ENGAGED AND CUTS THE HIGH FREQUENCY BANDS]

...and you can also boost the high end to add some sparkle.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYS GUITAR THROUGH MARSHALL JCM2000 WITH GE-7 ENGAGED AND BOOSTS THE HIGH FREQUENCY BANDS]

And so you can get all sorts of different sounds out of here. A lot of people like the mid-rangey sound where you also cut the high end so you can boost certain frequencies while you cut others.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYS GUITAR THROUGH MARSHALL JCM2000 WITH GE-7 ENGAGED AND BOOSTS THE MID FREQUENCY BANDS]

So you get a lo-fi...,

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYS GUITAR THROUGH MARSHALL JCM2000 WITH GE-7 ENGAGED AND BOOSTED MID FREQUENCY BANDS]

It makes it sound kind of like you're playing through a small radio or something if you boost the 1.6 and bring everything else down.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYS GUITAR THROUGH MARSHALL JCM2000 WITH GE-7 ENGAGED WITH STATED EQ SETTING]

And then you can also do the opposite: bring up the high and low end, cut the mids...,

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYS GUITAR THROUGH MARSHALL JCM2000 WITH GE-7 ENGAGED WITH STATED EQ SETTING]

...referred to sort of as a scooped out sound. You can also do all sorts of different curves: mostly low end...

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYS GUITAR THROUGH MARSHALL JCM2000 WITH GE-7 ENGAGED WITH STATED EQ SETTING]

...and you can go the other way as well. There's a lot of different possibilities on here. You get seven different bands to choose from as well as the level knob, but right in the middle it's pretty much not doing anything. So that's the Boss GE-7 Graphic Equalizer. Thanks for taking a look at it with us here on Gearwire.Com.