PREAMBLE

Run it gently and Preamble rounds the edges off your sound, polishing harsh synths or edgy guitars before they hit the amp’s input. Bring the gain up to the middle and things start to sharpen, and if you really push it, it buzzes, with intermodulation distortion throwing in some discordant tones of its own.

On guitar it adds a touch sensitivity that follows how hard you pick, so you can dig in or back off and hear the difference. 808s come out sounding like the Hammer of the Gods, and drums sound like they’ve been thrown into a metal barrel that’s on fire.

Preamble started life during the development of Buckets, when a wide range of pedals were trialled for their character. This particular pedal was already famed for its preamp, but playing with the preamp on its own turned out to be addictive.

Capturing it properly took a lot of experimentation: building the training signals, training a series of models, and spending much of that time investigating complex loss functions so the models would get the right sort of harmonics in every frequency range. Each model was then A/B’d against the pedal by ear, with detailed measurements alongside, on quiet and loud material and on bass as well as midrange.