The PreDrive 3! All New for Fall 2025!
 
For audio samples on the DEMO page click here!
 
 
Pre-Order now open!
Early Bird Run Estimated shipping late November 2025
 
Early Bird Pre Sale!
Save $50 when you order early with code: EARLYBIRD (Just fixed it!)
Limited Supply!
 
Early Bird Stock: 14 of 20 left
 
REDISCOVER YOUR CLEAN TONE, AGAIN!
Released 10 years ago, the original PreDrive was the very first Pettyjohn Electronics pedal, and it was the very first guitar pedal featuring a discrete opamp based buffer and boost circuit. The PreDrive was designed to be first in the chain, with the same ethos of professional studio mic preamps, often costing north of $1500 a channel, and borrowed heavily from the technology and designs that Stephen Pettyjohn used as a recording engineer. Now, the new PreDrive3 builds on that legacy but greatly expands the tone shaping power, adding a console-style three band semi-parametric EQ, including the highly musical Inductor based MID band derived from the FILTER EQ pedal. We kept the popular wide-range sweepable High Pass and Low Pass Filters, giving the user full control of shaping the perfect base-tone with a full bag of five complimentary bands of EQ! Furthermore, the original Harmonic Drive circuit makes it's return, being further optimized, adding a wide range of the soft clipping tones that uniquely bridges the gap between pure cleans and edge-of-break up saturated tones. The combo of preamp, console EQ and saturation have been around for decades in studios for tone shaping microphones, often called a channel strip, and now the PreDrive3 brings all those tools into a compact pedal format!
 
"STUDIO GRADE" DISCRETE OPAMP BUFFERS
The phrase "Studio grade" gets thrown around a lot but for us it isn't meant to be hyperbolic. Simply, we wanted to use pedals that have the same quality of parts and tools on our pedalboard as we use in our studio, so that's what we did! After studying classic studio preamps and EQs, it turns out many of them are designed with Discrete Opamps so we set out to find out if these, rather expensive, chips could bring anything special to the pedalboard. It turns out, there are three circuits they seem to excel in; buffers, boosts and EQ circuits, AKA the main parts of a studio channel strip! The PreDrive has always been a pedal that aims to be a piece of studio rack gear in a pedal format and the PreDrive3 is by far the most complete iteration of that vision.
 
We use a 990 style discrete opamp in the PreDrive for the Input and Output buffers. The buffer stage is extremely important, mainly when it is the first circuit that your guitar is plugged into, as it interacts directly with the complex impedance of your pickups and cable. Any sonic information or nuanced details lost at this critical step can never be re-constituted down line, so this is why the discrete opamp is so well suited for this use case. The discrete opamp we use is designed specifically for high fidelity audio, with extremely low noise and low distortion up to an order of magnitude below even the best standard opamps like the Burr Brown. This highly accurate amplifier results in a more pure, neutral sonic response so the tone is more detailed and open. Many users in the past have described it as going from SD to UHD tv, while its the same picture there is just more resolution on the fine details. Once the complex impedance of the guitar has been converted to simple resistance through the buffer process that signal can then be further processed down stream with more resolution.
 
NOTE: The PreDrive's Buffer works with nearly every pedal, including most "picky" pedals, however, in the case that you have a special pedal that really doesn't play well with a buffer, we feature true bypass via the Buffer footswitch. The PreDrive3's output impedance has been reduced to be less then 1K, so it should play well with most finicky fuzz pedals.
 
BOOST FOR DAYS
Discrete Opamps are among the purest amplifier circuits ever made, thus their use in microphone preamps which need up to 80dB of clean, highly detailed gain. No guitar preamp or boost ever needs that much gain but we can easily achieve up to 20dB of boost while maintaining ultra linearity, which makes it perfect for clean boosts circuits! Biggest limitation here is the 9v that most pedals run on, so we have developed a custom voltage boosting circuit that takes 9-15v input and outputs a +/-18v for four times the internal headroom so every pick transient stays clean even at 20dB of boost!
 
ANALOG TONE SWEETENING FOR THE DIGITAL AGE
While we have preserved the original passive sweepable Low and High Cut filters found in earlier PreDrive versions, easily the biggest update in the PreDrive3's tone shaping power is the addition of a console style three band semi-parametric EQ! The EQ is essentially an expanded version of the EQ found in the FILTER EQ, featuring three bell filters with up to 10dB of boost or cut, and now each band features three carefully voiced frequency options!
 
ANALOG EQ WITH MOJO
Each of the frequency options in the EQ have been voiced for real world use, furthermore each band has been optimized to be maximally musical when being used as additive EQ. In this way it draws inspiration from vintage console EQs and great rack studio EQs. In a world full of clean digital pedals, there is still something magical about a great analog EQ that digital can't fully re-create. The way real resonance adds energy to the sound and the ability of analog filters to sweeten the sound of any signal is something many recording engineers still reach for. We have spent much of our time over the last ten years studying different EQ circuits and looking for ways to create some of that "magic" in our own EQ design.
 
HARMONIC DRIVE, UNIQUE GERMANIUM SOFT CLIPPING
Last but not lease, perhaps our favorite part of the PreDrive, is a little switch called Harmonic Drive. This little circuit is switched on with the mini toggle in DRIVE mode, and engages a germanium based soft clipping circuit that has been carefully voiced for a ultra wide and smooth transition from clean until the edge of breakup. Basically its a wide knee curve that incorporates the harmonic excitement and light compression associated with saturation, without fully breaking like a standard overdrive. We have made it so that it interacts with the gain staging of the buffer and boost to create a more colorful, saturated boost effect if one so desires.
 
DELUXE EQ MOD
The stock version of the PreDrive3 features a Dual Discrete Opamp running the input and output buffers. The Deluxe EQ Mod upgrades the EQ's stock Burr-Brown opamp to a second Dual Discrete Opamp. This adds extra musicality to the EQ and enhances the detail of the pedal even further! Dual Chip upgrade is offered at cost, $100.
 
MAX MOJO MOD
Upgrade the HPF with a Emerson Oil-in-Paper cap and signal path to PRP resistors for $69