An analog distortion studio
Recording-informed control over how distortion is made. Start with familiar Dist, Tone and Volume, then shape the bass, mids and harmonics. Switch in the preset compressor and gate when you want them.
Designed around recording decisions. Set by ear.
Malice began with a recording problem: making aggressive distortion sit clearly in a mix. Start with familiar distortion, tone and volume controls, then use Bass and Mid-cut to clear space around the sound.
The Steward works behind its switch. The compressor and gate are intended to be set during calibration, so playing does not require adjusting attack, release or threshold controls.
Control referenceTry a starting soundExplore the engineering
One continuous analog path
Choose what reaches the drive, how it clips, and what leaves it.
Wall of Ice controls the low end before clipping. Twin Assassins blends in two fixed midrange cuts, so you can feed the drive a broad, tight or scooped signal.
Set the pre-drive filtersThe LED ring rounds the drive’s peaks. Switch in the hard-clip ladder, the CRz fuzz, or both. These stages feed one another, so their interaction is part of the voice.
See the combinationsAurora Curtain sits after clipping, matched to the drive’s presence shelf. Move from a broadly flat balance with the Curtain closed toward +4 dB presence with it open.
Set the brightnessSwitch in the preset VCA compressor and gate for level control after distortion. Fast and slow detectors share the work; a phase-correct blend allows parallel compression.
Meet the StewardTry the distinction: pull Wall of Ice back to tighten a bass-heavy riff before it clips. Then lower Aurora Curtain to darken the resulting distortion. The second adjustment changes its brightness; it does not undo the first.
Printable control referenceWhat has been measuredExplore the six-board build
Use the controls to tighten a guitar, keep weight in a bass line or reshape a synth. Choose an instrument below for a starting point.
Hear it on the instruments it was built for. Each clip runs the pedal straight into a clean amp or interface, so what you hear is the pedal.
The high-impedance JFET input is intended to reduce loading on passive pickups. Wall of Ice and Twin Assassins shape what reaches the drive; Aurora Curtain shapes the high harmonics afterward.
Pull Wall of Ice toward the middle for tight, percussive chugs. Open it all the way for doom.
Keep Wall of Ice open for the low B of a five-string, or trim the lows for a more focused grind. CRz has its own bass cut, so the fuzz voice has a different low-end balance from the LED and ladder voices.
Bass drive lives or dies on its top end. Aurora Curtain lets the grind sit behind the note instead of on top of it.
Synths and line-level gear find an open door. Wall of Ice decides how much of the sub reaches Malice, which is where much of the character lives, and Aurora Curtain sweeps like your synth’s own filter.
Sing or speak through a microphone preamp and the voice becomes another instrument in the storm, from a radio-thin whisper to a torn, roaring chant.
Wall of Ice can reduce breath and handling rumble before clipping. Aurora Curtain reduces high-frequency content afterward, while the Steward can even out level changes. It is a broad brightness control, rather than a dedicated de-esser.
Starting points
Recordings of each starting point are on the way. The settings are in the player’s guide.
One stage feeds the next
The LED feedback stage is the foundation. Add the hard-clip ladder, the transistor fuzz, or both. Each processes the waveform arriving from the stage before it.
Clean: Clean · CRz: Off
Start with cleaner gain at low Dist. As the signal rises, twelve red LEDs progressively round the waveform. The feedback network stays connected throughout.
Clean: Ladder · CRz: Off
Feed the LED stage into the silicon-and-zener network for firmer clipping and a lower peak level. Re-match Volume after engaging it.
Clean: Clean · CRz: On
Feed the LED stage into two transistor gain stages. Their operating points bring a different edge; internal bias, gain and level trims tune the fuzz.
Clean: Ladder · CRz: On
LED feedback → hard-clip ladder → transistor fuzz. The downstream stages reshape what arrives, so the combined voice depends on their order and your Dist setting.
Comp engages the SSI2162 VCA compressor and gate after Aurora Curtain. The input, filters and clipping stages work with Comp off. LED rounding comes from nonlinear feedback; VCA compression comes from the separate dynamics processor.
Set the drive by earInspect the circuitProduction ladder values
Wall of Ice decides what the distortion is fed. Aurora Curtain decides what the distortion is allowed to say. Everything between them is yours to stack.
Choose what reaches the drive.
No one remembers who raised the Wall of Ice. It was old before the first ship sailed north, and everything that comes at it breaks there: the rumble beneath the floorboards, the boom that shakes the timbers, the weight that drowns a riff in mud.
Leave it open and the whole host pours through, every ounce of doom and sludge. Raise it and only the hard, cutting core of the note gets past. The wall decides what Malice will be fed.
Carve away what clouds the sound.
The Twin Assassins have no quarrel with the army. They wait in the alleys of the harbor town for two victims only: the boxiness that makes a chord sound played inside a crate, and the blur that smears one note into the next. Two blades, and everything else walks past them.
Send them in lightly for a whisper of shape, or let them cut deep until the voice is hollowed and carved. No one in the harbor has seen their faces and lived long enough to describe them.
Three ways to break the signal, one feeding the next.
She was human once. What was done to her out on the water is not spoken of in the harbor, but it changed her, and the change became her power. Now she waits in the surf with eyes like lamp-fire, and she calls.
She has the whole sea to sing in. A note can swing wide before her song ever touches it, so the clean stays clean; then she takes hold and bends it, rounding its edges into a warm growl that only grows hotter. Two more voices answer her. One closes its grip in two steps, bending gently and then pinning both sides flat: a hard, grinding bite. The other is a torn, lopsided fuzz that splits the note like a hull on the rocks, with its own ragged edge. Each feeds the next, so the corruption runs deeper as they stack, yet the note at its heart never drowns.
Lift the portal where she sits and her heart can be taken out, and another set in its place.
Sailors know better. They row toward her anyway.
Shape what the distortion leaves behind.
After the wall, the blades and the siren’s storm, something enormous opens overhead. The land beneath stays black and frozen, but the sky burns with color.
The Aurora Curtain draws down over the sound. Open, it lets every glint and edge through. Drawn lower, it takes back the fizz and glare the storm left behind, and the sound turns dark and smoky without ever going dull, each note still clear at its edge. It does not wash the storm out of the sound. It lets you see it whole.
Gather it all into one even voice, and silence when you stop.
The old keeper holds the last watch, at the very edge of the world. He has watched this sea longer than anyone can remember, and he no longer fights it; he knows it. When Malice raises the storm, he decides how much of it reaches the shore. The great waves are held back and the small ripples are left to live, so every chord and every single note lands where you meant it.
When the playing stops, he shutters the lamp and the hiss falls silent, without cutting the last chord short. He is not her enemy. Of everyone on that coast, he is the only one old enough to understand her, and from his rock, he is still watching for her.
He comes down to the shore only when he is called. Leave him on his rock and the sea arrives raw.
Studio power from an ordinary pedal supply.
Below the waterline, the Reactor burns. Nothing in this world moves without it. Iron, pressure and fire, built far stronger than any voyage should need, it drives every other force aboard and keeps the roar of the engine room below deck, away from the music above. However violent the sea becomes, it keeps pushing forward.
Some machines exist because they work. Others exist because someone wanted to know how good they could make them. The Reactor is the second kind.
Five stations. Six boards. One path for the sound.
The Ćuk-Linear Dual Reactor powers all five.
From the front, the Malice Madrigal is a piece of art. Open it up and you find a second one: a stack of circuit boards packed into a pedal-sized case, each designed for one job. Most of what makes the Malice Madrigal unusual lives in there, so we decided not to hide it.
Every stage was designed around the one before it and the one after it. What reaches the drive, how it breaks, what it leaves behind, and how the final sound holds together were shaped as one continuous path.
Component values, supply rails and calibration all contribute to the sound. The design uses stable parts and local supply filtering to reduce unwanted variation; temperature and production tolerances still matter.
The Reactor generates approximately +15 V and −15 V from a regulated 9 V supply. That gives the audio stages room for signal swing; the actual clean limit depends on the stage, the source level and the drive setting. Higher internal rails do not make every input level clean.
C0G capacitors, selected resistor values and local decoupling help control variation. These are design choices for stability, rather than a guarantee of identical response at every temperature or over the life of every component.
The input includes reverse-polarity blocking and limited over-voltage protection. The circuit references identify the boards, connectors and service checks. Fault damage depends on the fault; protection parts do not guarantee that a repair will be small.
Why that mattersSee the engineeringEvery number, in one table
None of this tells you what to play. These are forces, and they are placed in your hands.
One player lets only a trace of Malice through and keeps the keeper close. Another tears down the wall and drives her until the whole landscape collapses.
The world is yours to build.
Behind the artwork
The removable front artwork panel gives access to the socketed drive amplifier and three fuzz adjusters. Everyday playing starts with the panel controls; deeper adjustment is there when you want it.
The OPA1641 drive stage can move from cleaner gain through LED rounding and, when pushed far enough, amplifier overload. A compatible replacement may change that behavior; an audible improvement is not guaranteed.
Use a replacement assembly whose pinout, package or adapter, ±15 V rating and circuit stability have been confirmed by Desert Sky Audio.
Access and compatibility guidanceThe Ćuk-Linear Dual Reactor generates approximately ±15 V rails from the pedal supply. RLC filtering, bulk capacitance, capacitance multipliers and high-frequency suppression condition those rails before they reach the audio boards.
This supports the operating environment for clean gain and deliberate overload. The published supply curves describe calculated filtering, rather than a measured whole-pedal noise floor.
Explore the power architecture
Distortion Studio
The $749 first edition brings recording-informed voicing, an analog signal path and Mary Roberts’s original artwork into one pedal.
Dist, Tone and Volume are the starting point. Bass and Mid-cut give you direct ways to clear congestion, and the internally set dynamics section is engaged from the panel. The circuit handles the detailed filter and detector choices behind those controls.
The boards are hand-assembled, tested and set on the bench inside a 125B-sized enclosure. The socketed drive amplifier and internal fuzz trims provide ways to tune the voice; the online references show the construction, dated fitted values and later schematic changes.
The price reflects this particular combination of circuit design, assembly and artwork. The bench record shows what has been measured and what is modeled, so you can judge the design on its documented behavior.
A chance to own a pedal that is art from the inside out.
Email us and we’ll put you on the pre-order list for the numbered first edition. There’s nothing to pay to get on the list, and places are kept in the order the emails arrive. When your pedal is ready to build, we email you the ship date and a payment link, and you decide then whether to go ahead.
Yes. Line levels, keyboards and most synthesizers fit within the input’s clean headroom. Turn the source’s output all the way down before you plug in, then bring it up while you listen. Modular gear running hot will drive the first stage into distortion; the input won’t be damaged, and a little attenuation in front fixes it.
Yes. Run the microphone through a preamp first; the pedal takes the preamp’s line-level output the same way it takes a synthesizer. Start with the drive low and Stiward Thære Sæ switched in, then roll Wall of Ice back until the rumble of breath and handling is gone.
Use a regulated 9 V DC center-negative supply with a 2.1 mm plug, rated at least 300 mA; 500 mA gives startup margin. The October bench setup drew 148 mA at 9 V. A regulated 12 V supply also works but adds no audio headroom.
Do not use an 18 V or unregulated adapter. Reverse-polarity blocking and limited over-voltage protection are provided, but they do not guarantee protection against every supply fault. See the power reference.
The controls leave room for the artwork. The five panel knobs turn clockwise for more of their function; internal trimmers follow their own directions. Use the printable quick reference for the control names, switches and setup order.
Stiward Thære Sæ is set at the factory with thirteen on-board trimmers, so the panel stays simple. A technician can change the preset using the setup guide and three test points; the technical design guide has the response curves behind every setting.
Fully open, the pedal will pass and distort energy far below what a guitar normally produces. Guitar speakers can’t always take it. Bring the amp up gradually, let the cabinet tell you where its limit is, and use Wall of Ice to keep the deepest content out when you need to.
The high-pass and fixed-notch pair shape the drive’s input, the LED ring feeds the optional ladder and fuzz, and Aurora Curtain shapes the resulting harmonics before the compressor and gate. You get that ordered chain in one enclosure, with one set of panel controls and a preset dynamics section.
Email info@desertskyaudio.com for the applicable terms before placing an order, or describe the issue if you need repair support. Joining the current pre-order list requires no payment.
