Intensive Care Audio Life Support

Overview

The Intensive Care Audio Life Support is an original, all analogue overdrive and distortion pedal for the treatment of Bland Guitar Syndrome and Excessive Aural Dryness. Used regularly it can provide effective relief from these, and other music and instrumentation related conditions.

All Intensive Care Audio pedals are built in London, England, using high quality components and featuring soft touch, relay based trued bypass. No.Tom Guitars are pleased to offer Intensive Care Audio effects pedals as their exclusive London dealer.

Controls

The Intensive Care Audio Death Drive features 6 controls:

Preamp - Sets the gain of the overdrive, ranging from sparkly, chiming clean tones through to natural, tube like edge of break up and on into grittier distortion territory. This control interacts interestingly with the Clipping control; see below.

Volume - Sets the overall output volume, including when Boost is engaged.

Top - An extremely useful passive subtractive treble filter after the last gain stage used for taming high frequencies which can become more pronounced as gain is increased and clipping settings altered.

Bottom - A subtractive bass filter after the last gain stage which variably bypasses the output capacitor, just before hitting the output transformer. As this control is in parallel with the output capacitor some crackle may be present when adjusted at lower gain settings.

Clipping - The clipping control allows you to blend between two very different but equally useful clipping options. Fully clockwise is LED clipping, yielding a softer, more transparent break up. Fully counter-clockwise is a parallel arrangement of a MOSFET and a JFET which produces much harder, compressed and saturated clipping. The ability to blend between these two clipping options, in conjunction with the preamp control allows for an extremely wide range of overdriven tones.

Boost - Controls the gain of the boost circuit which drives the front end of the overdrive circuit. This can not be used independently of the overdrive circuit, it is used to hit the front end harder, increase gain and compression and act as a boost for lead/solo situations.