In Bethel, an analog man builds guitar pedal icons

Among serious electric guitar players and collectors, a few bits of gear stand out as holy grail acquisitions: Good examples of a 1959 Gibson Les Paul Standard guitar, or amplifiers built by Howard Dumble , easily sell for more than $100,000 each, when they can be found.

There are also holy grails in the world of effects pedals — the devices that can radically change the sound of any guitar rig by adding echoes, howls, snarls, whooshes and whirls with a stomp of the foot.

The asking price for a used Klon Centaur overdrive pedal, for example, has recently touched $10,000.

But perhaps the pedal hardest for mere mortals to obtain is manufactured in Bethel, Conn., in a cramped two-room shop on the second floor of an old house behind a disused strip mall, by a wiry and kindly musician/wizard named Mike Piera.

The pedal in question is called the King of Tone. It has a six-year waiting list.

‘ Best sound’

Piera was a software engineer working in Japan in the mid-1980s. After a time, he decided the wear and tear on his brain — and his back, sitting in one place all day — wasn’t going to be a long-term career. So he started buying and selling vintage guitars on the side, both in Japan and in the States, then moved on to vintage guitar pedals.

Some pedals, he found, weren’t made very well. But he had a talent for repairing them — and improving them — by reverse-engineering the innards, “so we could really figure out what made them tick,” using better parts and adding features.

His early pedal modifications — Ross compressors, Ibanez Tube Screamers, the Electro Harmonix Small Clone — got some traction in the guitar community.

“We actually had a waiting list” for an early modified Ross compressor, Piera said. “We couldn’t make them fast enough for years.”

By 2000, he was “sick of software engineering … I’m a low-level guy. I like to make things really efficient and to make them my own, but with Microsoft Windows, you weren’t really programming, you were just assembling things. I didn’t like that at all,” he said.

So he chucked the software career and set up shop as Analog.Man Guitar Effects in Bethel, in the same space he occupies today, and dedicated himself full-time to building and selling guitar pedals.

The risk paid off.

“It kind of slowly took off, but then it just started getting really crazy. And we started selling more stuff than we could build.”

The King of Tone was inspired by a pedal built by Marshall amplification called the “Bluesbreaker,” after an Eric Clapton-inspired sound. But the original pedal was poorly made, Piera said.

So, around 2003, he fixed it.

“We tried to make an overdrive pedal for Jim Weider, who was playing with The Band at the time, and came up with a modified version of [the Bluesbreaker], and it just took off. I didn’t realize how many people wanted to have a good overdrive pedal. I had no idea.”

Working alone late at night, as he still does, Piera selected the critical electronic bits — diodes, resistors, transistors — with the patience of a prospector. He acquired rare diodes that give the King of Tone its signature growl and soldered the parts by hand.

Piera did everything himself in the early days, from running the office to creating a relatively rudimentary website that still chugs along. But, mostly, he built pedals.

“We made them all with good parts, by hand. And they can be kept running forever.”

The King of Tone has a few knobs and two buttons — one to boost the volume level and one to engage the overdrive circuit, creating a tone that can range from a subtle purr to an angry lion , but firmly on this side of heavy metal.

By 2005, the King of Tone version 4 was complete, and orders were rolling in for it and other Analog.Man pedals, enough to keep the business going.

“I never starved,” Piera said.

Then, in late 2017, an English YouTube channel called “That Pedal Show” featured Piera and the King of Tone in an episode , and before long, orders exploded — 200 per day, far more than Piera could keep up with.

So the waiting list, now a thing of legend , got longer and longer. He has shipped nearly 25,000 units and counting.

His guiding philosophy then endures today: build pedals with the best sound, with the best parts, at a reasonable price, by hand.

“I never ran an ad for the King of Tone,” he said. “It was word of mouth.”

The King of Tone is used today by guitarists from John Mayer to Jason Isbell .

“Yeah. It’s one of the icons,” Piera said.

‘Best parts, reasonable price ‘

Meeting the demand is only getting more challenging. The secret sauce — the carefully selected diodes that are central to the whole vibe — are getting harder and harder to find.

“There’s two or three parts in there that have been discontinued for several years,” Piera said. “And I have to find them, the new old stock, which is really hard. … The diodes are definitely critical.”

He has enough supply to keep building for a few years, he said, and hopes to be able to find more before his stash runs dry.

“There are other diodes … they found some that sound almost the same. So, if we had to, we would use those, but we’d have to let people know.”

Analog.Man manufactures 50 to 60 King of Tone pedals, by hand, per week. Some 20 or 30 people a day add their names to the list. The price has gone up over the years, but it’s still a relatively modest $325.

To help meet the demand, Piera created the “Prince of Tone,” essentially one half of the King of Tone with some modifications. It costs about half as much as the King of Tone and is hand-made in China. About 20 go on sale every Wednesday at 1 p.m., “and they go in like three minutes.”

Enter the “Duke of Tone,” built in a partnership with MXR, a major pedal manufacturer. It is a mass-produced, gently streamlined version of the Prince of Tone and is now available nationwide. The Duke of Tone was introduced in late 2022 and was MXR’s best-selling pedal of 2023, Piera said.

Analog.Man builds a full range of other pedals — compressors, choruses, delays and the like — all using analog, not digital, tech. The “Sun Face” fuzz pedal can be configured in a paralyzing number of ways, based on which specific transistors are in the box, all to achieve subtle variations in tone.

Hand-made in Connecticut, USA

Why Bethel?

Piera grew up here, born in Danbury Hospital. The town’s proximity to New York and New Haven is ideal — “There’s a lot of young musicians who live here.”

Piera doesn’t share some people’s complaints about doing business in Connecticut.

“How expensive is it? I think it’s $200 a year to register your business — I mean, if that’s going to hurt your business, you probably shouldn’t be owning a business,” he said. “Property tax in Connecticut is pretty high, and we have to pay property tax on our equipment, but I don’t have a lot of equipment, so it’s not that bad.”

Analog.Man has been renting the same space for nearly 25 years, and although Piera’s landlord has suggested raising the rent, it is still affordable.

Finding employees isn’t difficult either.

“We’ve got about a dozen people [working locally] and several outside contractors” who build circuit boards out of state and ship them back to Bethel, Piera said.

“We’ve got a retired guy from Newtown who used to own an electronics company. He really knows what he’s doing, but he’s retired, and he just wanted something to do. He sits in his basement and builds chorus boards for us … He’s in his 70s or maybe older by now, but he’s been working for us for probably 20 years.”

After components are built and returned, the Bethel employees do the wiring and install the parts in their cases.

A Fender Stratocaster rests in the corner of the shop, and Ryan Gorman, a 20-year employee from New Haven, plugs in and tests every pedal before it’s shipped. He’s been using the same guitar and Roland amplifier for testing for years, and “he knows exactly how they should sound,” Piera said.

The COVID-19 pandemic slowed things down, but employees were able to come to the shop, pick up parts and assemble pedals at home.

“The majority of our pedals are still built like that because it worked out well,” Piera said.

The future

With such extraordinary demand, Piera could easily charge far more. On the used market, King of Tone pedals are selling for $700 to $1,000.

“We could certainly raise prices,” Piera said. “But I try to make it a good value for musicians. Because musicians, these days, it’s really hard for them to make money. Probably the majority of our customers are just guys like me and you who have a real job but really like playing guitar. … I raised the price little by little, but I’m trying to keep it reasonable, because we still have a fine profit margin. I want people to like us and understand our company philosophy — the best sound, hand-made, with the best parts at a reasonable price. I think it’s hard to beat that. That’s why we don’t have to advertise.”

“Most other companies are having everything mass produced by robots, which is cheap, but you can’t fix them if they break.”

The Analog.Man philosophy might have discouraged major pedal manufacturers from coming in with lucrative offers to buy the company.

“Everybody knows our things are handmade, and most companies don’t want to deal with handmade things,” Piera said. “But eventually, hopefully, someone will be able to do something to keep the company going the same way, or maybe my guys can do something. I’m getting very tired, and I’ve made enough money — I should probably retire.”

Piera’s only regrets are business-side — that he didn’t invest more in parts when they were available.

“I’m getting smarter. If I find something, I’ll say, OK, how much will it cost to buy enough parts for the foreseeable future, until I retire? … The act of buying parts takes my valuable time. So I’m trying to get more of them.”

Finding certain transistors, for example, is a challenge. Russia was the source for years, but since the attack on Ukraine, those supply lines shut down.

“But, luckily, we can still get parts from Ukraine,” Piera said. “And in Ukraine, there were a lot of Russian military parts, so we’re able to get our Russian supplies from Ukraine now.”

Many components that are available on eBay and elsewhere are fakes, he said.

“If I had bought more of the original ones when they were still available, it would have been a lot easier.”

Work hard, play loud, drive fast

Piera likes to keep late hours — arriving at work at 3 p.m., working until nearly midnight. It gives him time to do his other things.

He plays in a band called Analog Mike and the Digital Artifacts . When he’s not doing that, he might be attending to his collection of exotic cars, and he has been known to race vintage Porsche 911s at Lime Rock race track.

But it comes back to his company.

“It’s good to know that there’s a lot of ways you can go into business for yourself. And if you think it through and make the right decisions, you can make a pretty good living … More people should try to do something like that.”