Intensive Care Audio's Death Drive is a gloriously textured saturating and sustaining Doomy Distortion - perfect for Shoegaze and Stoner Rock Tones

One of Intensive Care audio’s more recent pedals is also its most easily accessible - with very straightforward controls and not a hint of complexity beyond its core tone-generation ability.

You essentially have a beautifully saturated Drive / Distortion with dual kind of gain controls - where the Destruction knob loads on the Gain, while the Drive knob somewhat extends its Saturation and Sustain. If you crank both of those all the way up you get a lot of compression which somewhat diminishes the beautiful harmonics that are found a touch further back on those dials. In terms of the circuit makeup of the two Gains - the Destruction is Pre - and comes before the EQ/Filter, and the Drive is Post Filter - which very much explains their impact too!

You obviously need to experiment with Drive and Destruction to find the right sweet spot balance between those for the degree of gain you’re after - for me it’s around 2 o’c on both those dials. By default the core tonality is a little dark and dense - meaning I tend to have Mood / EQ and Ego / Volume pretty much maxed out. There’s a number of softer voicings to be found here as well as the slightly more fun and more full-on extent of the pedal’s capabilities. Stefan Fast really get the measure of this pedal in his below demo.

Controls - Drive (Saturation / Post), Mood (Dark > Bright EQ), Ego (Output), Destruction (Distortion / Pre).

As mentioned - with Drive and Destruction both set to around 2 o’c I get the perfect texture for this pedal - with the most open and richly harmonic character. And for my guitar and rig I tend to have Mood (EQ) and Ego (Volume) maxed out. In fact I could really do with a touch more volume here ideally - as I tend to call on the use of my Strymon Sunset to post-boost the signal here most of the time.

It does sound pretty darn glorious though - beautifully richly textured - and its high degree of saturation lends itself excellently toward Shoegaze duties - particularly into Reverb, as well as Stoner Rock.

It’s not nearly as gainey as say the Blackhawk Balrog which is more Doom / Sludge Metal really. The Death Drive doesn’t go quite so extreme.

It’s a really distinctly voiced drive and actually highly adaptable up and down the gain scale - once you figure out the interaction between the Drive and Destruction controls. If you’re thinking of dipping your toes into Intensive Care Audio - this is a really nice place to start.

Of course it comes with one of those cool ICA Footswitch (+) Toppers and beautifully designed wedge enclosure with appealing medical device themed graphics. Available for just £160 and equivalent direct from the Intensive Care Webstore, and at leading international dealers.

All of Patrick’s ICA pedals have high appeal - while the others can have a little more inherent complexity to them - so this is your perfect starter for 10 really!