StarLifter Deep Dive...part 1

The StarLifter story starts way back in 2006. I had a fledgling pickup company and a line of basses I was making in a small rollup door fronted shop space in Yucaipa, CA.  I was using on-board preamps from a few suppliers including Audere, Aguilar, an occasional Sadowsky, and even a handful from F Bass.

Pickup sales were going well and it made business sense for us to have our own preamp to offer alongside the pickups. Mostly though I wanted to have a preamp of my own, something of a synthesis of my favorites listed above.

Full of undaunted certainty that I could pull this off I dove into the deep end. I had a SPICE simulator on a laptop pc, some schematics I’d found here and there, and a few books that were obliquely applicable. A vastly more challenging and blurry 6 months of seemingly endless trial and error than I had expected finally got me to a point where we had something. Well, almost. I think our first run of about 20 units had an error in the circuit that I quickly corrected once I found it. THEN we were good to go.

There are a lot of preamp pedals in the world. Still, I wanted to add my own to the pot and it seemed I had a good starting point.

In those early days we had through hole circuit boards made for the on-board preamps and I paid a good friend to build them out for us at a per unit rate. This DIY capability was alluring and we attempted to design and build something that could be done totally in house. We being myself and Devin Cline, an exceptionally clever fellow that worked for me back then. He had come up with a really cool LED side lighting design that we were all pretty excited about.

Then we had to decide if the move was to modify it for 2 batteries and utilize a bipolar power supply like the really cool Raven Labs boxes I’d come across. It seemed like it at first, but mission creep is a real thing, as are real world supply constraints, which I ran into with power supplies. Lacking a plug and play readily available bipolar DC wall wart like the old Raven Labs gear meant I had to move to a voltage regulator. And for the performance I wanted that meant we ended up needing at least 12vAC.

Suddenly I was way out of my depth. This was not the DIY(very challenging DIY!) project that the on-board preamp had fortunately been.

But we had come up with a mission statement - a single box gives consistent studio grade sound anywhere you need it, whether it’s into a sketchy amp on a ratty dive bar stage or into a classic Neve console in one of the world’s great studios.

Enter Jeff Genzler and Scott Andres, his primary engineer post Genz-Benz. Jeff was just starting the Genzler company and we quickly agreed that he and Scott could take my on-board preamp and use it as a starting point for this pedal idea that had been floating around for a while.

What happens next?? That story is in Part 2.