Science Amplification - Mother Preamp Review
Amp in a box!
I’ve been looking for an amp-sim pedal for a while. I think that this type of pedal (Amp or Cab Sims) is the most emerging type of pedal of the past couple of years. So many companies have made recreations of vintage amps in a pedal form and, to be honest, there are some incredible solutions out there. The Universal Audio Cab Sims are amazing, the TC Electronic ones are great budget options, and the Walrus Audio ACS-1 or the new BOSS IR-2 are also awesome pedals. Real Amplifiers not only cost a lot of money (if you want to get a good one) but also take a ton of space and require microphones to record them. While a real amp will probably sound best, especially a tube amp, pedals are catching up so quickly and it takes a very well-trained ear to distinguish a pedal from a real amp. Amp plugins are also on the rise with hundreds of options but the unavoidable latency is a definitive no-go for me.
So during my search for a great amp-in-a-box pedal, I came across the Mother Preamp by Science Amplification which was made in collaboration with John Synder of Electronic Audio Experiments (another pedal company that creates incredible pedals!). Science Amplification is a company that has been making high-end amplifiers for the past 15 years. They are known for creating incredible amps and cabs that are handbuilt, designed, and tested in Seattle using top-tier components and craftsmanship. So when they released their very first pedal - the Mother Preamp - I knew I had to test it out and solve my eternal problem of having a Direct Out amp pedal in my studio.
Design & Features
Mother Preamp is a solidly built, dual-channel preamp pedal that comes in black and hammered green colors. Mother is specifically designed to replicate the behavior, tone, and functionality of Science Amplification’s Mother Dual-Channel Amplifier which is an all-tube amp. The tubes are replaced by FET transistors and they recreated the all-analog signal path to get the pedal to sound just like the original amp.
It has some big & hefty Moog-style knobs that feel great to tweak and its layout is split into three distinct sections. The Loudness part has two knobs for channels A & B and controls the Volume of your incoming signal, the Gain part also has two knobs for each channel, and the EQ section has your standard Bass, Middle, and Treble for your EQ, and the two more mysterious knobs labeled Absence & Depth. Lastly, there are two footswitches. One is for bypassing the pedal on & off when using the main Output and muting/ unmuting it when using the Direct Out and the second footswitch is used to switch between channels A & B.
On the back, you have a mono input, a channel switch input, and two outputs. The main output can be used when you want Mother to work as a preamp pedal before an actual amp and the Power Amp/Direct-out output can be fed directly into a power amp or your audio interface.
Be careful! Always make sure that the input you’re plugging Mother into your interface DOES NOT have Phantom Power enabled! That can actually fry your pedal so make sure you check before you plug it in.
The main difference between Mother Preamp and other Amp Sim pedals is that Mother does not have a Cab Sim onboard. It essentially works as an amplifier head without a speaker. So to get your final tone, you’ll have to load an impulse response plugin and load the IRs of your choice. Science Amplification offers some very nice-sounding free IRs on their website that you can use but you can always load any IRs you want. I mainly used the IRs provided by Science Amplification since they sound great and are custom-made by them to match their own guitar & bass cabs and I imported them using the free VST called NadIR by STL Tones.
I’ve got a lot of Amp plugins that I could use instead of a pedal like Mother but my main problem is, as expected, latency. Having to just use the IR loader certainly helps and if I had a less busy project, the latency was close to zero and I could track my guitar directly through Mother and the NadIR plugin without any delays. In busier projects, latency started to kick in and made things harder though. For reference, I use a Macbook Air M3 with 24Gb of RAM paired with an Audient EVO 16.
I would love for Mother to have a cab sim onboard so I don’t have to use an IR loader on my laptop. IRs play a big part in your final tone so you have to use them to finalise your sound. Your guitar sounds already better directly out of the Mother Preamp, however, an IR will smoothen things up and sweeten your sound and it’s a crucial step to get the sound where it should be. So having to use a plugin, kind of takes away the dawless experience you can have using pedals.
On the other hand, if you have a guitar cabinet, you can now have the power of an amazing amp on a pedal form and at a significantly lower cost without sacrificing your sound!
How does it sound?
Mother Preamp just sounds beautiful. Channels A & B are not identical and provide you with two very distinct sets of sounds. Channel A is the “clean“ channel that will boost your signal and be relatively clean for the most part of its range. If you crank up Gain A, you will achieve edge-of-breakup type of sounds and some crunchier tones but that’s also relative to your pickups. The clean sound of Mother Preamp is smooth and round and in higher Gain levels you get a mild and vintage type of drive without getting into distortion territories.
Channel B is there for high-gain sounds but can also create a very pleasing clean tone. It’s like starting from Channel A at around 2-3 o’clock and having a lot of extra gain range. Your sound will be saturated and driven on Channel B but even on higher levels, it always sounds great. I mainly use humbucker pickup guitars as I prefer them to signal coils so my signal is already a bit fatter and using Channel B, I could get to those metal or punk-sounding tones easily.
After using Mother for a while, I ended up using Channel B 80% of the time. And that was very surprising to me since, for my kind of music, I don’t really need high-gain guitar sounds. The thing that made me use it over the cleaner Channel A, was that Channel’s B clean tones had an extra bite and presence to them and I could also bring some more drive using my playing’s dynamics at taste.
As we mentioned above, the EQ section and the knobs Absence & Depth are shared for both channels. So any settings you have for Channel A will still apply when you switch to Channel B. The only separate controls between channels are the Loudness & Gain settings.
The EQ on the Mother Preamp is very smooth and subtle. I love the fact that you can slowly carve out your frequencies without any gaps or sudden boosts or cuts. All the knobs, Bass, Middle & Treble, have a full range that allows you to get very precise, unlike many other pedals where the EQ section feels too harsh and more like an aggressive filter.
Now on to the Absence & Depth knobs. I’ll be honest and say that I haven't seen these types of controls on any other pedal so far. So it was more of an exercise of trial and error to understand what they were doing to the sound. The Absence knob is clearly more audible and is there to control the level of upper harmonics. As you increase the Gain, more harmonics will start to appear and Absence is there to somewhat tame them. If you turn the knob fully counter-clockwise you’ll immediately hear that it unleashes all the high-end frequencies and harmonics resulting in a very bright sound. If you’re also lacking bass, the effect will be even more prominent and will create a more hollow and top-heavy sound. The second you lightly turn the knob clockwise it starts to smoothen those upper harmonics and the sound becomes more rounded. It’s almost like it’s completely off at 0 and once you start turning it opens up and rolls off some of the high frequencies immediately.
Depth on the other side, is for the lower frequencies of your signal. Unlike the Bass knob, Depth controls the bass of your tone before it hits the overdrive stages. It prepares your sound to hit the Gain while the Bass knob controls the post-gain low frequencies. Fully clockwise, it will give you a fatter, thicker sound, and counter-clockwise it will make your tone tighter and a bit more thin-sounding.
Overall, the Mother Preamp gets the job done perfectly. Another thing I love about it is that it doesn’t try to emulate a specific type of vintage tone. It has its own sound which is very transparent and flexible without the limitations and gimmicks a vintage amp sim often has. And that freedom allows it to be versatile and it can be molded to sound exactly how you want it to sound.
Who is this for?
Mother Preamp is a guitarist or bassist pedal that is looking to elevate his/her tone. Its versatility allows you to use it in multiple applications - in front of your amp to make your signal fatter and well-EQed before it hits the amp, as an Amp Sim pedal alongside a Speaker Cab Simulation when you don’t want or have an actual amp, or as an amp-head into a power amp.
I must say that since I’m more of a synth-person and I’m slowly dipping my toes into more elaborate and professional guitar routings and I’m trying to craft my guitar tone, I might have not taken full advantage of the Mother Preamp. But for what I wanted initially, I got blown away. And I’m sure there are tons of people out there who are looking to correctly plug their guitars into an audio interface and sound, well, like an actual guitar through an amp. And Mother certainly delivers. The sheer amount of guitar sounds I could now have without using an amp plugin (that would introduce a ton of latency) was amazing and completely changed the way I use my guitars in the studio.
Mother will hand you all the tools to shape your sound and the Dual-Channel architecture is perfect to quickly switch your sounds and go from a clean tone to a high-gain tone with the press of a footswitch. This is a must-have feature, especially when playing live shows.
I wouldn’t say that this pedal is mostly aimed at guitar-tone purists. I’m definitely not that type of person but I can still appreciate the craftsmanship and the level of detail that was put on this product.
Conclusion
I love being introduced to companies like Science Amplification. Once you get a product like the Mother Preamp, you feel it’s not just another preamp or amp sim. When people who know what they’re doing create a handmade pedal, it shows. And I’ve played with probably hundreds of pedals so far and I have developed an eye and an ear for these things.
Perfect clean sounds on both channels, very low noise floor, and a variety of high-gain tones are all you need from a guitar amp and Mother can give you these things in abundance. And all that comes in a solid & sturdy, mean-looking pedal that can be placed comfortably on your pedalboard.
This pedal stays on my pedalboard from now on. Even if I choose to track guitars through an amp, Mother will then take its place as an incredible preamp pedal because I simply can let go of the versatility and quality this brings to my sound.
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