BOSS Blues Driver BD-2W vs EarthQuaker Devices Plumes

Aug 19, 2026

BD-2W vs Plumes usually comes down to one question: do you want one gain control that travels a long way, or a toggle that gives you separate voices to pick from? Both lean on JFETs, both stay clear where cheaper drives smear. The widget above plays them through the same loop, the same chain and the same room at three gain settings (Light, Medium, Hard), so you can hear where they part company before reading a word about it.

BOSS Blues Driver BD-2W

The BD-2W is the Waza Craft revision of BOSS’s long-running Blues Driver, built from carefully selected discrete analog components around a newly revised amplifier circuit. The name undersells it badly. I’d call it the Indie Driver if the branding were up to me, because it covers clean boost, medium crunch and genuinely fuzzy sounds without ever feeling like it’s out of its depth.

The panel puts Level and Gain in the top corners as the two larger knobs, Tone as a smaller knob between them, and a slide switch for Standard and Custom mode just under the LED. Standard is the classic BD-2 voice. Custom adds body, sustain and a beefier low end, and that’s where all three settings in the widget sit. The JFET gain stage is a big part of why it feels amp-like: with Gain rolled back to 3 on the Light setting it sits at a glassy edge of breakup that cleans up when you back off the guitar volume, while the Hard setting with Gain at 10 gets ragged and thick, close to fuzz without a fuzz circuit anywhere in the box. Bypass is buffered, as usual for BOSS. There’s more on the mode switch and the full Gain sweep in the full BD-2W demo.

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EarthQuaker Devices Plumes

The Plumes is EQD’s Tube Screamer derivative that refuses to behave like one. They swapped the classic 4558 op-amp and BJT buffers for JFET operational amplifiers and convert the 9V supply to a bipolar rail internally, which is the main reason it stays open rather than congested as the Gain comes up.

Level sits upper left, Gain upper right, and Tone below the three-way Mode toggle in the center. That toggle is the personality control, and it’s the thing the BD-2W has no equivalent for. Position 1 is symmetrical LED clipping, the crunchiest and most compressed of the three, and it’s what both the Light and Hard settings in the widget use. Position 2 pulls the clipping diodes out entirely for straight op-amp drive, light and open even with Gain near the top, which is exactly what the Medium setting does at Gain 9. Position 3 is asymmetrical silicon, closest to a stock Screamer but with more clarity and output. The Tone control reshapes the whole voice rather than just rolling off treble, and with a Tele bridge pickup I’d happily run it low, the way all three settings here do. The full Plumes demo walks through each mode.

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Get This One If…

Get the BD-2W if you want one box that travels from gentle breakup to almost-fuzz on a single knob. Indie, shoegaze and classic rock are its home turf, and Custom mode plus high Gain settings mean you can get a genuinely dirty sound without adding a second pedal. It also stacks happily in front of or behind other drives, so it works as the messy end of an existing dirt section rather than a replacement for it.

Get the Plumes if you want a low to mid gain overdrive that never gets congested and three distinct voices to choose between: clean boost in mode 2, TS-style grit in mode 3, compressed LED crunch in mode 1. It plays nicely with both single-coils and humbuckers and sits in a mix without fighting the amp. If you need a high-gain pedal, this isn’t it, and that’s where the BD-2W’s top end of the Gain range has the wider reach.