I was taking a video to be time-lapsed through a window in my house where the eclipse would be visible. In my area of the world, it was only a partial eclipse, but closer to totality than I had ever seen before in West Virginia. Hence my reason for taking a time lapse.

As I was editing the video to account for moments of cloud interference and the change of position of the sun in the sky, I noticed what looked like a con-trail for a brief moment in the lapsed video. I traced it in the original back to the moment this plane flew directly between my camera and the moon and the sun. It eclipsed the eclipse—and I was in the path of totality.

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A cornerstone is the first stone laid when building the foundation for a new building. The Impostor Overdrive is the first project that I’ve started and finished to a level of quality and polish that constitutes a complete, finished product. Starting off the “building” of my works.

The Backstory

I’m a classic Les Paul/Marshall guy. Tube amps are the de-facto standard for good tone among electric guitarists. For a long time, I wanted a Marshall tube amp. Fast forward a little, I got a kit to build a 50W tube amp. Specifically, the 2204 circuit designed by Marshall. I ran it through the speaker of a solid state Marshall 1×12 combo amp before I got a Marshall 2×12 for it. I even put my own custom badge on it that says “Champion”. So I took the 1×12 and left it at my church so I could bring my amp head and just hook it up. It was fun to finally have a real tub amp to play through. Until I got tired of wheeling my guitar, pedalboard, and amp back and forth every week. So I wanted to build a pedal for myself that could take the place of the amp when I go anywhere but home.

The Inception

I’m an engineer. Not by profession or by education, but by mindset and action. I have a technical mind and an intuition to solve technical problems. Electronics have been an interest of mine since I was old enough to use a screwdriver to take apart all my old electronic toys as a child and our electronic junk in the house. Back to the present; I’ve built a few guitar pedals up to this point, but they all fell short of their marks. However, they weren’t failures—they were valuable learning experiences. With all the electronics engineering knowledge that I had acquired up until this point, I knew without a doubt that it was possible to build a solid state overdrive pedal that sounds no different from the preamp section of a tube amp.

Early Prototype

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