Analog Man Guitar Effects Pedals - Guitarmalade

cmj is back in New York this week CMJ Music Marathon and we are here at the living room in Brooklyn to talk to Mike piera from analog man guitar effects pedals about his philosophy some of his new designs and some of his best-selling pedals this is guitar malade Walkman is based basically going for the vintage sounds of the classic rock blues and prog rock that I really like we're really trying to get those kind of sounds that I grew up with and people have been constantly going back to and revisiting we'd have to be the king of tone pretty much we can sell as many as as we can as we can make but you know we don't want to to overextend ourselves I don't like mass production oh boy they were recording using my pebbles I think some of the some of the early Gary Clark jr. stuff sounded fantastic with his epiphone casino through the through the Astro tone being a tone used one of our prototype distortions Gary Clark jr. isn't the only notable guitarist employee ironically bespectacled son face emblazoned petals from Kenny Wayne Shepherd to the edge many have quite analog man over the years so I stopped by his headquarters just outside New York City to play through some of his new and classic designs where the company that really knows the vintage pedals cuz we started as a vintage pedal dealer you've always studied these old phenols ever since the first chorus try to learn what makes you tick so we could make our pedals sound as good as possible we get some clown Centaurs an original 30 year-old Roger Mayer Octavia the original Octavia that Roger Mayer built was different from any of the ones that he put in production the ones he made for Jimi Hendrix were were quite a bit different got a pretty decent selection as the mxr is from the original small box with the script logo up to the block logo just before they went out of business it's our paint booth it's called a hallway all the capacitors we use are pretty much new old stock various chips we definitely have the funkiest demo guitars that you'll see around this is a really cool K great for slide guitar or blues still trying to figure out how to do it efficiently years are kind of our flagship product now the analog delay alone has got more features than most because it's got two actual settings of both delay time feedback and effects level whereas most analog delays will only have two different delay times we've got the modulation on there too beautiful yes great with this compressor for the cleans it really brings it out it makes your attacks nice and strong it makes the sustain nicest rug do right there's no rear it's just a delay yeah the way we've done some samples where people swear that there's reverb on it but it's just the delay because it's just so serial yeah okay you do you really should have have at least one buffer especially if you've got this many pedals the reason you want to have a buffer is it just kind of keeps your guitar signal strong you don't want too many of these because every one of them is gonna change your signal slightly and it's gonna take a little bit of that organic feel away from your playing you know you don't want to have 10 boss pedals in a row because each one of them has a buffer and by the time you're through there turn them all off you're just not going to feel happy with your tone probably so by having one buffer or maybe three and some pedal boards you preserve your tone but you don't change it too much by having too many buffers yeah I always want to pretty much have the delay last the only thing you might want to have after delay might be a reverb pedal booster or volume pedal would be good after delay that everything else should be before it at the beginning of the order you usually want to start with your compressor because your compressor usually wants to see the guitar directly other pedals before the compressor will change your guitar sound and get rid of the dynamics so the compressor won't do its thing quite as well although other people like tray love to have tube screamers in front of their compressor which makes it higher amount of compression it's more of an effect the fuzz is I'll put kind of before the OverDrive's and after the compressor and we've got a couple of Sun faces which are basically our version of the Dallas arbiter fuzz faces this one is one I really like that not too many people know about its high gain germanium germanium is nice because it's very warm and smooth silicon is a little brighter and harder the thing about it is they're high games you can get a lot of fuzz germanium ZAR No only not but these are high-gain does have a power jack but you have to be careful because germanium transistors are positive ground if you share this power with another pedal you'll blow out your power supply people tend to lecture means because they clean up and you'd back the guitar down and then you can roll it up start getting the fuzz silicon is going to be brighter it doesn't really clean up quite the same rhenium is definitely a little warmer and cleaner tell me that the geranium responds to heat very very much we do is we put these Sun vials on here which is actually a bias control so when it gets warmer the bias will go up and you can turn the Sun dial down to smooth it out a little bit but most germanium is if it gets too hot like above 80 85 they're just not really gonna sound good they lose they lose that nice high-end it's like turning your film back down the silicon doesn't have that issue so the silicon can be used at any temperature and it'll always pretty much sound the same without a powered Jack we don't put an LED because the LED will use something like twenty to thirty times more power than the pedal itself I have one of the peppermint fuzzies on my board and I have the on/off pot you hear it click and that disconnects the battery so that's a nice feature to have so you can leave it connected in your pedal board all the time but sometimes I'll forget and I'll leave it on for weeks and I'll come back and it still works fine after weeks I should have known better than to ask an electronics guru about the inner workings of his pedal in my experience such questions are not always answered in a manner that will satisfy anyone other than those who have reached similar level of tech nerd nirvana given the usual in-depth and arcane responses favorite red ones I believe has the bc18 II threes in it ever since I started selling the N K T's which was 15 years ago everyone else just bought up the remaining stock in the world all the ones I've found in the last five years or so have been fakes or they've been picked over and they started really bad so I'm kind of giving up on our NK T's which is unfortunately because we're so you know we're kind of famous for those but I don't want to be selling anybody some fake transistors that just don't sound as good and there you have it an uncompromising connoisseur of tone based out of a small shop in Connecticut churning out some of the best boutique pedals and most popular mods it that's cool from the lush sounding analog delay with digital tap tempo the myriad fuzz pedals built to order analog man pedals are sure to please even the most discerning guitar god

Channel: Guitarmalade

Views: 23,805

Keywords: Analog Man (Business Operation), Effects Unit (Musical Performance Role), Guitar (Musical Instrument), Music Education (Field Of Study), Episode

Id: zr5PLCrE46E

Length: 8min 46sec (526 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 07 2015