Cleanish "preamp" pedal: Tonemender or Azabache?

[Badside]

Basically my amp has a glorious overdriven tone, but it's a single channel amp so it's hard to get a nice clean tone going (I use the guitar volume right now but it's not always ideal).
The amp has a Zero-Loss FX Loop from Metro amps installed and it works amazingly well with pedals. I did some tests running my guitar straight into my MXR Custom Badass Modified OD (with the gain really low) into the FX return as a "clean preamp" and it sounded surprisingly well. So I'm looking to build something purposedly built for this that I will use as a preamp bypass (using some sort of loop switcher) for my clean tone. It will bypass all amp's tone control (except for presence) but still run through a tube power amp. Basically a guitar preamp but with pedal-level output.
For example, a Tech21 SansAmp blonde would do the job, but I'd rather build something myself specifically for my needs (and something that does not try to emulate the whole amp)

The target is a blackface-ish tone (glassy scooped clean with a bit of added warmth).

I've singled out two ROG projects:
- Tonemender: would work as is, tonnes of headroom, but beside the eq'ing it might not "colour" my tone enough (just want some basic warming up, with perhaps the ability of adding some hair on top when needed)
- Azabache: the clever tone control is really interesting, would probably be the best at emulating a Fender preamp, but is still designed as an overdrive effect and might lack clean headroom (will probably hit those clamp down LEDs quickly when strumming chords on the Les Paul)

I WILL be running it at 18V so that should help with clean headroom.

I've thought of two options:

- Go with the Tonemender, but add a JFET stage after the tone stack and before the final buffer/recovery stage. A pair of clamping diodes would prevent JFET overload and a "gain" control inserted just after the tonestack but before the diodes would allow me to dial in just the right amount of "clipping" (from none to some). Final recovery stage would have more than enough gain to make back the lost signal.

- Go with the Azabache and rely on the 18V V+ to increase headroom. Double the clamping LEDs or insert a trim control under it to fine tune clipping/compression for max headroom without clipping the JFET. Remove one of the J201 clipping stages since max distortion is not the aim.

I do hope to shove in a Belton brick reverb in the same enclosure (complete "Fender clean" solution) so the smaller part count of the Tonemender is appealing. But my heart wants to go with discrete components instead of an opamp...

I've looked at the FET-2B project too (basically a FET version of a Fender Deluxe Reverb's preamp), but that J201 input will be FET clipping galore (and I'm not a fan of FET clipping, hence my interest in the Azabache)

Any thoughts?

[mth5044]

I don't have any experience with either of those circuits, but did you see the Alembic F2B with FETS? Simple and might be just what you need.

[Kipper4]

Fetzer might work too

[mth5044]

How did you get along with this?