Buffer, Booster and Rich Overdrive all in one, with a mix of germanium sweetness

Three knobs and the truth! This preamp is useful and plenty loud, so don’t be surprised to run it lower than you might with other light drives or boosts. A little goes a long way. GAIN is how much boost is applied to your input signal: all the way off is just the signal from your instrument, turning up will clip the diodes nicely. HIGHS is the amount of high frequency content. It interacts with the OUTPUT knob, which controls the output volume. With GAIN all the way off, OUTPUT can still give you up to +12db of boost, so with those other controls up, you may want to keep it down. Horses for courses, they say.

The slide switch on the inside will convert this pedal between buffered and true bypass. The buffer can help maintain signal integrity for longer signal runs.

It’s 1972. A Soviet surveillance microphone preamp has made its way west thanks to a courageous defector. The nascent, nefarious, and invisible Caroline Corporation obtains it and converts it into devices for military psychoacoustic special operations, then covertly delivers them to legendary users with fame and influence for evaluation. The guitar player of the world’s most famous band plugs in his rosewood guitar into one and uses it for a famous benefit concert. A producer runs instruments through another directly into a mixer, spills a bag full of illicit drugs into its faders, and records all-time smash hits. An unknown actress brings one to a film screening and wins the Golden Globe. Facing public exposure from Senate hearings over arms trading and supermodel cloning scandals, the Corporation mysteriously dissolves in 1983, leaving no traces except abandoned file cabinets in a dilapidated office basement. Decades later, the Corporation’s hilariously neglected “Guitar Company” satellite office, blissfully unaware that their parent company has dissolved decades earlier, discovers the schematic and parts specifications. They source some discontinued Russian “unobtanium” diodes and recreate its special flavor.

There is no evidence that any of the above has or has not happened. So anyway, here’s ICARUS™. It is “sonic awesomeness” based on our P