Chase Tone Secret Preamp

As someone who’s always had an open ear for anything that is described as a magic tone sweetener, learning of the existence of the Chase Tone Secret Preamp was enough for me to start hunting one.
It took a couple of weeks to actually get one because all the pedals I found on the second hand market were gone the same day. These are extremely easy to sell.

The unit is, as you can see, quite simple at first glance. You have one knob and one switch.
What is it supposed to do then? Chase Tone claims that it is a faithful reproduction of the preamp built into the Maestro Echoplex EP-3 machines. I’m no vintage guitar gear expert, but apparently people used them with the echo turned off to get the preamp sound for their guitars.
The three way toggle switch is meant to capture the early ’70s (bright) and the late 70’s (dark). I can’t tell if Maestro changed the EP-3 machines throughout that decade or if an EP-3 gets darker when you use it for a decade. The middle position is a mix of both.
It is a pedal with a single switch and a single knob – however, it pays off to read the manual before you repeat my own experience, which involved a lot of head scratching – because while the single knob named Volume does make the unit completely silent when you set it fully CCW, that’s the end of similarities with your usual volume knobs.

I want to quote the Chase Tone website:

VOLUME CONTROL- Wired just like an original EP3 for Amazing Versatility!

FULL COUNTER-CLOCKWISE = NO SIGNAL

10 to 11 0’clock = UNITY GAIN (Depends upon EQ Setting)

1 to 2 o’clock = 3dBs+ MAXIMUM OUTPUT BOOST

3 to 5 o’clock = 1dB or 2dBs with FLAT EQ just like a worn, vintage Echoplex

(source https://chasetone.com/secret-preamp/ )

Summing up my experience in three letters: Meh.

I get it. It’s a magic tone sweetener if there ever was one.
The setting I found to work best in my setup (bright and Volume set around 10 o’clock, which results in a slight volume boost I’ll have to compensate) was slightly altering the sound. I got a bit more treble, and to put it into opaque audiophile terms, I felt that it tightened up the treble content.

Playing with headphones I could feel the change more than actually hear it. The notes just feel a bit different under my fingers while playing.

But here’s the crowbar to the knee: When I deactivated the Secret Preamp and therefore fell back to my default clean sound, the tone did not become bland or lifeless or otherwise boring.
I was simply going from one very good sound to another very good sound.
So the pedal did give me a different flavor of excellent, but not a “moar better” experience.

It is entirely possible that the “tightening up the treble content” thing is a crucial bit of what it does, but in my environment, there’s not much to do in that regard.

So let’s take a look at what it does when you play other dirt pedals in it.
To sum that up quickly:
This can be great, depending on the dirt pedal you use. In my environment it is nearly as good as the JPTR FX Jive, which beats the Secret Preamp hands down in every regard as a ‘giving the dirt a different flavor’ pedal.

A very important feature here is that the Jive has a volume knob that actually does what it says, which allows you to bring the output to unity. But it also has a wide range on the gain knob where you get only a hint of saturated overtones when playing the pedal solo (which sounds so good, many people use it as an always on), but when you kick in your drive pedal, you get a completely different texture from it.

This allows for clean sound, Jive solo sound, dirt pedal solo sound and both pedals in combo sound.
The Secret Preamp has that volume jump issue that needs to be accommodated if you want to actually use the foot switch it comes with.

I was under the impression that you will get some sort of audible saturation out of this pedal, but maybe that only happens when you push more treble content into it (with a guitar instead of a bass) or my impression was simply wrong.

I already said it at the beginning of this text, these units are extremely easy to sell. I’ve had mine online for less than a day before someone snatched it up.