Korkie Preamp (x2)— More Star Wars Pedals

[BricksnBeatles]

Some of you may know about this pair here.
These two pedals are a long time off from when I hoped to be sharing them— I built the pink one this Monday and the blue one last night. I was hoping to have these completed for May the Fourth of 2021, but my dumb pseudo-perfectionist mind kept going back and slightly tweaking the graphics every other week between summer of 2020 when I had the idea, and November of 2021 when I finally placed my first order of UV prints from Tayda. A heavy semester of classes kept me from taking a crack at these until late may— I was hoping to build them in time for May the Fourth of this year or for the 45th anniversary of A New Hope, but I realized I forgot to order the pots, so now we're finally here in the present. As such, I present these to you on perhaps the most fitting date— I've been eagerly waiting since Monday to share these today for the...

FINALE OF THE OBI WAN KENOBI SERIES!

That's right folks, on this very day in which we will learn the outcome of Obi Wan's 9BBY adventures, you'll also learn a bit about the obscure fan theory that birthed the concept for these pedals.

For those of you who keep up to date with the animated side of Star Wars content, you'll hopefully already get where this is going, but for those of you who don't— there are spoilers ahead of you intend on watching the 2008 Clone Wars animated series in the future.


Korkie Kryze is the nephew of Satine Kryze, Dutchess of Mandalore, whom he lives with. His aunt Satine just so happens to have been in a brief forbidden love affair with a young Obi Wan Kenobi prior to his knighthood. The dutchess has no known siblings other than her young sister, Bo-Katan Kryze, who is also Korkie's aunt. Hmm... no established parents or even a mention of them, and he lives as nobility with his aunt who many years ago had a secret affair with a member of Mandalore's sworn enemies; the Jedi? And he happens to look quite a bit like a cross between his aunt and her former lover?

Yeah, so Korkie looks a bit like Obi Wan and Satine, and it's been speculated to death that Korkie is the secret bastard child of the two, with him being guised as Satine's nephew to avoid the political fallout of the Mandalorian Duchess having an illegitimate child with a member of a rival cult. It's a fun fan theory about one of the most minor characters in the series' run, but it probably doesn't hold much water. Nonetheless, when I first learned of the Benson Preamp pedal, despite having little interest in yet another JFET amp-in-a-box circuit, I immediately felt a compulsion to build a clone of it called the "Korkie Preamp". Why? This was my train of thought: Benson -> Ben's Son -> Ben Kenobi = Obi Wan Kenobi -> Obi Wan's (speculated) son = Korkie.

I've always liked word association chains- sue me!

Anyway, here are the Korkie Preamps!



The blue one (dubbed the "Bo-Katan Blue" edition) is built to the specs of the initial run of the benson preamp, with the addition of a selectable charge pump to offer both 9v and headroom-boosted 18v operations. The pedal features a similar powder blue coloring to my favorite-looking version of the benson preamp which first caught my eye back in 2020.





The pink one (dubbed the "Beskar Blush" edition), in addition to featuring the same selectable charge pump "headroom" switch, also omits the 10μF capacitors from the sources of Q2 and Q3 to ground for a significantly cleaner gain range, and a few slightly tweaked cap values to make it more suitable for bass. The shell pink coloring is inspired by the very popular limited edition version of the Benson Preamp that you used to see in nearly every Instagram-aesthetic pedalboard picture, and it was chosen because I absolutely love shell pink and would love to build a shell pink Marauder-styled Bass VI one day!





No demo for these unfortunately— I planned on recording an instrumental cover of the Kenobi theme, but I'm too busy with the end of my summer semester to record anything this week.

Hope y'all enjoyed, and may the Force be with you!