"An apple a day keeps the doctor away." "Health is wealth." "If you haven't got your health, you haven't got anything." Among the many (many) platitudes people use to promote wellness in all areas of life, illness persists. In musical communities, some of the most common sicknesses include Bland Guitar Syndrome, Excessive Aural Dryness, and Impending Sonic Malaise. Luckily for those affected, they have Intensive Care Audio to turn to.
All joking aside, Intensive Care Audio is among the boutique effect world's most exciting and freshest faces. The brand deals in highly expressive and inventive devices with interesting, new outlooks on classic effect archetypes. The doctor will see you now.
Down with the Sickness
The Intensive Care Audio story starts with The Doctor. Not the time traveler, mind you, but The Doctor heretofore professionally known as Patrick Smith. The mastermind behind the whole Intensive Care Audio clinic, Smith kicked off the brand proper in London in 2020 – with perhaps now some strange, retrospective element of irony – at the onset of pandemic lockdowns. Smith, a lifelong tinkerer and sonic experimenter, forged his way through the era with exciting, new circuits. The Doctor set out to fill a gap in the pedal market in which he felt underrepresented when it came to bold, weird tones. With this, we now have Intensive Care Audio and a healthy lineup of handmade, refreshingly new effects meant to get weird and wild.
Musical Medicine
With Intensive Care Audio, you get a truly unique yet uniform, one-of-a-kind regimen of concentrated doses of holistic sonic serums. The Intensive Care Audio stack is packed with innovative and inventive effects with plenty of power behind them to come to fresh tonal conclusions. Setting out, we have two schools of amplified treatments – saturations and modulations.
Intensive Care Audio Drive and Distortion Effect Pedals
Perhaps the best way to enter Intensive Care's sonic institute is with their Death Drive Overdrive. At the helm, the Death Drive features an original overdrive and distortion circuit with an incredibly interactive, "all-in" sort of tone shaping experience that deals heaps of distorted goodness. The Death Drive's two gain controls help in providing new angles from which to attack what you might expect to be a usual kind of distortion device. It's these new angles on classic effect interfaces that make Intensive Care Audio so compelling.
These overdriven offerings continue into Intensive Care Audio's Death Muff Fuzz and Life Support Preamp. The Death Muff's additional gain-shaping control gives an added layer of complexity and customization to what's normally a fairly everyday effect experience while the Life Support's vast suite of frequency shaping, clipping customization, and overdriving optimization options push it far beyond a traditional preamp/overdrive kind of pedal. Rounding out Intensive Care Audio's selection of distortions, we have something of a bridge with the Vena Cava Filter which pairs a filter-born distortion effect with a ring modulator for melding monstrous mixes of drive to effectively forge new, sonic remedies.
Intensive Care Audio Modulation Effect Pedals
Intensive Care Audio's two modulations offer similar effect experiences as they work to build upon and reinvent preconceived notions of modulation. The first, the Recovery Phase Phaser, punches in with a powerful phasing modulator with an eight-way LFO shape rotary dial that offers exciting new ways to fashion a phaser. From there, the initial Recovery Phase phaser funnels into a secondary onboard effect engine that can be swapped between a tremolo or another phaser altogether with the same eight-way LFO waveform selection.
The Intensive Care Audio Fideleater Lo-Fi Chorus and Delay finishes out the current Intensive Care lineup of effects. The Fideleater, certainly one of the brand's boldest and most dynamic creations, couples a powerful chorus modulator with aggressive delay capabilities and distinctly lo-fi artifacts. In essence, the Fideleater is a lo-fi modulator that quickly leans in to vibrato pitch bending with a modulation lag that can be "detached" to introduce a delay function at the flip of a switch. The Fideleater does quite a bit to communicate what Intensive Care Audio is all about with interesting tonal routes to take through eight different LFO modulator waveform shapes and two two-way frequency and time-shaping toggles.
A Picture of Health
For something truly interesting and on the cutting edge of boutique effect pedals, you can turn to The Doctor and Intensive Care Audio for something to ease your sonic sickness. Of course, health is not something you attain but something you live. Leading a fulfilling sonic life is reward in and of itself, if we could be so bold. For Static Tone Syndrome, Monotonous Guitar Condition, and Chronic Tonal Blandness, take two and call us in the morning.
