BOSS Blues Driver BD-2W vs JHS Morning Glory V4

Aug 19, 2026

BD-2W vs Morning Glory is a comparison between two very different ideas of what a low to medium gain overdrive should be. One has a JFET gain stage and a range that runs all the way into fuzz, the other cuts bass and pushes mids so your guitar carves through a band. The widget above plays both through the same loop, the same chain and the same room at three gain settings, so you can hear that before you read about it.

BOSS Blues Driver BD-2W

The BD-2W is the Waza Craft version of BOSS’s long-running Blues Driver, built from carefully selected discrete analog components around a revised amplifier circuit. The name undersells it badly. Blues is not the first genre that comes to mind when I reach for it, and I’d call it the Indie Driver if the branding were up to me.

The panel puts Level and Gain at the top corners as the two larger knobs, with Tone as a smaller knob centered between them and a slide switch for Standard and Custom mode just below the LED. Standard is the classic BD-2 voice. Custom adds body, sustain and a beefier low end, and it’s where all three settings in the widget sit.

The JFET gain stage is what gives it that sweet, amp-like feel. On the Light setting (Gain at 3) it’s a glassy edge of breakup that clears up when you roll back your guitar volume, and by the Hard setting (Gain at 10) it’s ragged and thick enough to blur the line with fuzz, with no fuzz circuit anywhere in sight. Bypass is buffered. There’s a lot more of it in the full BD-2W demo.

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JHS Morning Glory V4

The Morning Glory V4 comes from the Marshall Bluesbreaker family, and it’s more opinionated about frequencies than its transparent reputation suggests. There’s a noticeable mid hump, not as pronounced as a Klon or a Tube Screamer but definitely present, and a significant bass cut baked into the circuit. I read that bass cut as a deliberate session-guitarist call from Josh Scott: guitars get their low end trimmed during mixing eventually, so the pedal does it up front.

The layout is Volume top-left, Drive top-right and Tone below Drive, with a gain toggle on the left that takes the LED from blue to red and jumps the saturation meaningfully. It feels like a second, hotter pedal sharing the enclosure. A side-mounted high-cut switch trims top-end edge, subtle but welcome on a bright rig, and it’s engaged on the Hard setting here alongside the high-gain mode and Drive at 10.

At low gain it adds just enough compression and tone-shaping to make a guitar sit properly in a band mix. Push the Drive and it gets tighter rather than thicker, since the bass cut keeps it from turning muddy. Bypass is true bypass. The full Morning Glory demo walks through the Drive sweep and both high-cut positions.

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Get This One If…

Get the BD-2W if you want range out of one box. It covers glassy clean boost, medium crunch and almost-fuzz without swapping pedals, and the mode switch stacks two genuinely different characters on top of that. It also plays well in front of or behind other drives, and it’s been a quiet favorite among indie and shoegaze players for years. The buffered bypass makes it a sensible front-of-board pedal on a long cable run too.

Get the Morning Glory if you need to be heard. The bass cut and mid push are the feature, not a compromise: in a loud band with a second guitar player, this is the one that stays audible without turning up. Single coils into a clean or slightly dirty amp is the sweet spot. Humbucker players can make it work, though the bass cut can leave things feeling a bit lean.