Intensive Care Audio Intensive Care Fideleater V1

The Intensive Care Audio Fideleater V1 is a lo-fi chorus, vibrato and delay pedal in one box. Delicious Audio, covering it in July 2023, called it the London maker's "take on the lo-fi modulation chorus/delay," and the maker presents it with a medical theme, describing it as a pedal "for the treatment of Bland Guitar Syndrome and Excessive Aural Dryness"¹.

What sets it apart from an ordinary chorus or delay is how the three effects overlap. Rather than keeping chorus, vibrato and delay in separate modes, the pedal blends them, and the reviewer at Pedal of the Day found that it goes further than mixing existing sounds: "This super-pedal not only mixes these effects genres together into a delicious auditory stew, but manages to create new" effects, providing what the review called countless hours of experimentation².

A lo-fi chorus, vibrato and delay

The lo-fi character is the point of the pedal. Where a conventional digital delay aims for clean repeats and a clean chorus aims for transparent shimmer, the Fideleater sits in the territory of degraded, wobbly modulation, the kind of sound associated with worn tape and aging circuitry. The delay side and the modulation side feed each other: slowing and warping the repeats produces chorus and vibrato textures, while pushing the modulation harder produces the glitching the pedal is known for.

Delicious Audio's Paolo De Gregorio described Intensive Care Audio as "one of the most interesting emerging boutique makers of the new decade," with all of its pedals built in London using high quality components¹. The Fideleater is not the maker's only pedal: Pedal of the Day also reviewed the Intensive Care Audio VENA CAVA FILTER Distortion v.1, a distortion pedal that shares the same relay based trued bypass switching and, notably, the same eight-position LFO waveform switch³.

The controls: eight LFO waveforms and two footswitches

The pedal's control set is built around a low frequency oscillator, or LFO, the waveform that shapes the modulation. Most chorus and vibrato pedals give you one or two waveforms, usually sine or triangle. The Fideleater gives you eight, selected by a rotary switch called WAVE FUNCTION¹².

The waveform choice matters in practice. Sine and Triangle give the smooth, familiar motion of a conventional chorus or vibrato. Square snaps between two values, producing a stepped, choppy modulation. Ramp Up and Ramp Down sweep in one direction, and the two Random positions, Random Slopes and Random Steps, generate unpredictable movement, which is where much of the pedal's lo-fi, broken-machine character comes from².

The two footswitches are both soft touch. The left switch is BYPASS and the right switch is TAP TEMPO, so the LFO speed can be tapped in rhythm rather than dialed in by ear with the FREQ knob¹².

Power and bypass

The Fideleater runs on a 9V center negative supply only, drawing 70mA¹. That polarity is the standard used by most modern pedal power supplies, so a typical isolated output will suit it, but the maker's wording is firm: use only 9V center negative.

Switching is soft touch, relay based trued bypass, described identically by both Delicious Audio and Pedal of the Day¹². A relay-based switch engages the effect electronically rather than mechanically, which is what allows the soft touch feel underfoot.

What the reviewer said

Pedal of the Day's December 2021 review of the FIDELEATER v.1 focused on the pedal's range. The reviewer wrote:

Delicious Audio, Paolo De Gregorio, July 2023¹

The Pedal of the Day review reached a similar conclusion from the other direction, finding that the pedal mixes the chorus, vibrato and delay genres together and creates new effects, offering what the reviewer called countless hours and days of entertainment and experimentation overall².

Versions and where it is made

All Intensive Care Audio pedals are built in London, England, using high quality components, a point made by both Delicious Audio and Pedal of the Day¹². In July 2023, Delicious Audio reported that the Fideleater had "just been released in a more compact version," so players comparing listings may encounter both the original FIDELEATER v.1 Lo-Fi Chorus Vibrato Delay and the smaller current version, the Intensive Care Audio FIDELEATER¹.