Ibanez Bottom Booster Review (BB9) – Fat Bottom Boost!

Hello there and welcome back to yet another guitar pedal review! Recently, I have started purchasing guitar pedals, mostly overdrives, distortions and boosts. After having switched to tube amps and reactive loads, I found myself trying as many pedals as possible. I eventually would like to stop, however, I also want to share my experience with you throughout this journey.

One of the pedals I got was an already discontinued and forgotten guitar pedal by Ibanez, the Ibanez Bottom Booster BB9. As I always do, in this Bottom Booster review, I will do my best to provide as many details as possible about this pedal as well as a brief demo video.

TL;DR

Trying as many boosters/drives/distortion pedals as possible is an inevitable phase for guitar players who are looking for the holy grail of guitar tone! Ibanez Bottom Booster was one of the candidates to cure my amp for better-distorted tones.

The Bottom Booster features a classic pedal design by Ibanez and belongs to the company’s 9 Series pedals. Although this pedal was discontinued a long time ago, it’s still possible to find these in the used market.

In my opinion, Ibanez BB9 Bottom Booster does a couple of things very well that are really beefing up the low end without squeezing and tightening everything. Sometimes this is not what guitar players are looking for, but sometimes it exactly is.

So beware that this pedal is not a TS pedal that will tighten the low end while pushing the front of the amp harder. I believe this pedal works excellent with single coil pickups, however, the tone that it generates with humbucker pickups (on clean or OD channels on your amp) may not be everyone’s cup of tea.

Other than that, it has a hissing noise when used on extreme settings on OD channels of an amp, so it’s a bit limiting as you can’t use this pedal with every setting on every channel. These kinds of pedals all react differently to overdriven channels of an amp. Most of them may create feedback, but a few generate hissing noise like BB9 does.

cigilovic.com approves the Ibanez BB9 Bottom Booster pedal, however, would like to inform guitar players with the facts mentioned above. BB9 is a booster pedal that should be used for a limited amount of use cases in a guitar setup.

As always, let’s start with a quick introduction to this legendary brand, Ibanez for those who have never heard of this!

About Ibanez

As many of you know, Ibanez is a legendary Japanese manufacturer of musical instruments, primarily guitars and basses, as well as amplifiers and other accessories. Unlike many of us are aware, Ibanez has a long history in making musical instruments and is possibly a way longer-established company than many of us think.

Ibanez‘s history can be easily traced back to 1908 when Hoshino Gakki which is a Japanese musical instrument company was founded. In their early days, they would import Spanish guitars only. But also had a long-term ambition in the guitar business.

The Ibanez brand name was actually derived from the name of the actual Spanish luthier Salvador Ibanez who was building guitars for the company. The company first used the Ibanez Salvador name and later just branded itself under the Ibanez brand to honour the Spanish luthier.

As Ibanez was getting a lot of attention for their extremely valuable guitars (lawsuit era), Gibson brought suit against Ibanez due to their clone guitars, Hoshino Gakki did not really want to fight against it as the company could be in the same situation not just with Gibson but also with other guitar manufacturers. This era was the triggering moment for Ibanez to take a look at the company’s long-term ambition in the guitar business.

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Through the 70s, Ibanez worked with various artists who featured Ibanez’s original designs such as Paul Stanley, Steve Miller, George Benson and Bob Weir. However, moving forward with the 80s shredders era, they still had issues with their brand identity. Actually, what Ibanez wanted was someone like Eddie Van Halen and what he did for the Kramer brand.

Ibanez had already worked with legendary guitar players such as Lee Ritenour, Joe Pass, Steve Lukather and Alan Holdsworth, but the company was missing a rockstar image that could boost the brand’s identity.

After having long discussions and meetings, they decided to go to Steve Vai! Vai was already getting a lot of attention when he joined Frank Zappa at the age of 20 years old. Later, he replaced Yngwie Malmsteen in Alcatrazz and also released his debut album. Around 1985, he joined David Lee Roth’s band, taking giant steps into the rock music scene already.

Vai was already cooperating with other guitar brands such as Kramer and Yamaha, but his customisation needs were usually neglected and he ended up with pretty much the same standard models that these companies manufactured with some tweaks for him.

Ibanez eventually managed to contact Steve Vai and got his attention and their cooperation which changed the guitar designs profoundly just started! Legendary luthier, Mace Bailey at Ibanez made prototypes for Steve Vai based on his input and came up with the JEM design, which would later give birth to the legendary RG series.

This collaboration made Ibanez so successful and gained huge respect and following in the guitar community in the 80s until this day. Although the RG model was considered the edgy, modern and unusual guitar design back in the day, it’s accepted as a classic electric guitar design that has its own place next to Strats and Les Pauls.

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Today, Ibanez is still manufacturing dozens of models along with their classic line and one of the most respected guitar brands ever known to us.

Ibanez Bottom Booster BB9

The Ibanez Bottom Booster (BB9) pedal was originally released in 2008 and was part of the Ibanez 9 Series pedals. I believe it was discontinued around 2015.

As the name suggests, the Bottom Booster is a boost/overdrive pedal that has an emphasis on the lower frequencies. It provides a pretty fat bottom-end boost and can be used as a boost for any type of guitar types and music genre.

Unfortunately, there is not much information going around about this pedal on the internet anymore. So I did my best to search through the internet archive and gather most of the useful information available.

Ibanez Bottom Booster Tech Specs

Before I provide you with my brief review, let’s first have a look at the tech specs of Bottom Booster.

As you can see and read, the Ibanez Bottom Booster features a classic Ibanez pedal design which is still used by Ibanez for some of its current pedals. Before we jump to the review section, let’s check the demo video featuring some sound samples and show you this pedal in action,

I used my Ibanez RG565 with Seymour Duncan Parallel Axis and Hot Rails pickups, Marshall JVM410HJS, Two Notes Captor X SE directly into RME Babyface PRO FS and Reaper. I only used Lexicon Concert Hall reverb as an effect. There’s no post-EQ applied.

Ibanez Bottom Booster Review & Sound Demo (no talking)

I played mostly improvised stuff during the demo which I came up with just before making this video. So it may not be the most entertaining demo, however, I think you will have a pretty good idea about what Bottom Booster sounds like.

Also note that I used the clean channel on my Marshall amp, but also switched to the OD1 channel and used Bottom Booster as a boost.

Ibanez Bottom Booster Review

The one I got had the original box and the manual as well and I must say it is in a pretty good condition.

As I mentioned, the Ibanez Bottom Booster features a classic Ibanez pedal design which is still used by the company on some of the pedal series currently. Although this design feels very sturdy and has the vibe to offer, the footswitch is not the best for operation. It is not always easy to switch this on if you are not pressing the switch with your foot on a straight angle.

You can actually see this happening in the demo video I prepared. Since I used 2 cameras, I had to sit in a weird position as my pedalboard was on my left. And while trying to switch it on, I often found myself not being able to execute this simple action :).

The Ibanez Bottom Booster is made in China which you can from the back photo. The 9V battery compartment is also placed at the back.

It features a classic layout of controls. You have your basic Gain, Tone and Level controls. Instinctively, one would definitely start trying a TS-like setting and it was exactly what I started with while trying this pedal :). Even with the minimum gain settings and pushed level, it adds a lot of colour and enhances the bottom end quite a lot.

But it does not make the bottom end tight and squeezed. Actually, it’s pretty much the opposite. Lots of bottom-end juice is added to your overall tone.

As you can hear from the video, I tried playing this pedal with both Seymour Duncan Parallel Axis and Hot Rails pickups. I think with single coils, this pedal really shines and adds beefy bass frequencies which helps with having a more muscular tone with single coil type pickups.

While using this as a boost on an overdrive channel, it was able to generate a lot of pronounced bass frequencies and also helped with getting more gain as I was driving the input of the amp harder.

Hissing Noise?

As you may have read on the internet, this pedal has a hissing character when combined with overdriven channels and higher tone settings. Since I read this on the internet so many times, it was relieving as it wasn’t a specific issue with my Bottom Booster.

This means that you shouldn’t consider using this pedal as you would use any other drive pedal. In my opinion, it is a tad limiting in usage, as you have certain settings of the controls that work. Not cranking everything is a good approach with this pedal.

So I suggest you use this pedal as an additional colour pedal on the low-end side rather than just cranking everything. It definitely retains the looseness of your overall guitar tone and doesn’t alter it too much in terms of compression.

I also suggest using this pedal with single coil-type pickups rather than humbuckers. After having tried so many overdrive/distortion/booster pedals with my setup, I can confidently say that the Ibanez Bottom Booster is a unique pedal that does one thing very well.

Other than that, I don’t find a variety of use cases with this pedal for my playing.

Where to Buy Ibanez Bottom Booster?

As I mentioned, the Ibanez Bottom Booster was discontinued a long time ago. However, you may still find one in the used market. Actually, I’m already listing the pedal on my Reverb shop. As you may guess, I’d like to try as many pedals as possible, so you can also purchase this from my Reverb shop and help me try another one :).

Check out Ibanez Bottom Booster BB9 on Reverb here

So I suggest you check out Reverb regularly if you are after Ibanez Bottom Booster. Currently, there are multiple BB9s listed by different sellers in the EU. Hope you like this brief Ibanez Bottom Booster review and find this helpful!

Thanks for visiting my blog and supporting me so far! I will hopefully see you in the next review here!

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