Analog Man Vintage guitar effects


Who are we? Mike and Howard (Mick) Davis

Analog Man is one of the larger Guitar Effects dealers in the world, with customers from Australia to Japan to Europe. Even so, we are small and try to treat everyone like a rock star.

But Analog Man is not just a dealer - it is a BRAND- quite unique in that it may be the only enterprise which manufactures, modifies, buys, sells, and repairs vintage, new, and custom guitar effects. Specializing in custom made, vintage and high-end, you won't find cheap Chinese "happy meal toys" style effects here.

Analog Mike has been playing with guitar effects since he bought his Maestro Phaser (with SPEED and BALLS) new in the mid '70s to make his Farfisa organs and Hagstrom-II sound better. You will see the same white Hagstrom at the shop still being used to test modified pedals, Mike's first guitar. Here is Mike (on the left) with Howard "Mick" Davis, who designed many of the cool Electro-Harmonix pedals in the 70s. This picture is from the 1990s at the NYC guitar show which was held in the basement of a church. Analog Man started as Analog Man Vintage guitar effects before the boutique pedal industry started. So we learned all about the classic pedals, which ones sounded good, and why. Then when they were too hard to find, we started building them.

Mike is not a salesman and will not try to sell you something you may not want. You will not see us spamming all the guitar forums and social media trying to sell pedals. We are only interested in helping you find what you are really looking for and getting The Tone. Analog Man is operated as much for enjoyment of cool gear as for profit - so let's have some fun with this stuff! If you don't want to have fun, we can refer you to several other dealers. We like to treat each customer as a prospective friend. I now have friends all over the world with the common interest of vintage guitars and effects.

Analog Man is unique in being able to meet all your effects needs:

  1. Buy and sell vintage effects
  2. Buy and sell new, boutique, and custom effects
  3. Manufacture Analog Man brand effects
  4. Modify pedals to sound and work better
  5. Repair service including referrals to specialists in different areas
  6. Creating the best new effects with vintage values
  7. Free help with effects problems by EMAIL or better yet on our Facebook page.
  8. Referrals to individuals and companies related to guitars or music
  9. Professional consultation and technical services in the Northeast

www.analogman.com is alive!

This funky old web site is up and running but not much different than before, someday I hope to have time to reorganize this vintage style web site. We were about the second web site in the world that had guitar effects, they all looked like this back then! Our website was up before Gibson or Fender had any website. We added a new shopping cart website BUYANALOGMAN.COM in 2007 to make ordering easier and to work better on mobile devices.

Analog Man - the shop

I think our shop is unique in the guitar effects world- it has a large 1000 square foot room with high ceilings and all the best vintage amps set up for demos. And we added a second large room in late 2007, doubling our size as it was getting very cramped.

On the right is the part of the shop where I keep some of the effects. There are a lot more that you can't even see... I did a rough count and counted over 600 pedals here.

We are open only by appointment but I am here almost every weekday, so if you are traveling between NYC and Boston be sure to stop by!

Analog Man demo ampsAnalogman Demo Amps

  • 1961 Tweed fender Champ
  • 1958 Fender tweed deluxe
  • 1967 Fender blackface Deluxe Reverb
  • 1967 Fender Super reverb
  • 1972 Fender Twin Reverb
  • 1969 Marshall 100 watt Superlead with 4x12 Cabinet
  • 1978 Marshall 100 watt combo
  • 1964 Ampeg B-15 bass amp
  • 1990s Ampeg VL-1001 high gain guitar amp
  • 1969 Acoustic 360 bass amp
  • 1980s Fender Super Champ
  • 1960 DeArmond R5T
  • 1959 Supro 1696T
  • 1987 Gorilla x-652 turbo amp (just kidding)

Guitars

We always have several types of cool guitars (and plenty of cheesy ones!) and basses including a well-played '69 Fender Jazz Bass. Feel free to ask for our '99 Les Paul '59 Reissue.


Here is a shot of my bro Jim Weider playing one of his famous Teles. He's testing my fuzzface mods to find the perfect pair of transistors, which we then built into a pedal for him. He used this modified fuzzface on his record REMEDY which he recorded in the summer or 2001. You can really hear it on the beginning of the song Metal Jam, when the guitar starts out alone. He used in on about that whole track. Jim also borrowed my Marshall amp and used it on almost every track of the album, blended in with his vintage Fender amps for a superb thick, rich, clean tone. Jim had never used Marshalls before but now he loves them. I though I'd never get my amp back but I was glad that it was used in the way it was intended to be used - by a master guitarist!

Keyboards etc

We also have a Keyboard corner with MiniMoog, DX7, Fender Rhodes, ARP Pro Soloist, Vox Jaguar organ, Moog Taurus pedals, Leslie 850, and other cool equipment like a Roland TR-808 drum machine for you hip hop and techno people. I even hauled my 1955 Hammond M3 up the stairs recently. Here is Dizzy Reed (Guns n' Roses) checking them out:

Dizzy Reed checking out Analog Man Keyboards

Effects

I am starting to put up displays of effects. So far I have about half of them on display shelves. On the left are a few of our shelves, how many effects can you identify??


Repairs/Mods

On the right is a shot of my old workbench, where all the mods, repairs, and checking out of each pedal were done. On a normal day you will find us doing several tube screamer mods and repairs; Fuzzface mods, repairs, and construction; new Analog Man brand pedal construction and testing; building custom switch boxes; doing true bypass mods for customers on wahs, big muffs, etc; and checking out and studying each effect that comes in for resale.

Effects Museum

We also have a few glass displays of the vintage effects. We have a shelf with a bunch of famous pedals like modified TS9 pedals from Trey Anastasio, KWS, and Scott Henderson; Mark Karan's Sunface, Dave Malone, Andy Powell, and KWS's old King of Tone pedals, Mark Ford's and Jim Weider's original Sunfaces, Bicomp #1, etc. All these guys traded in for new versions so I kept the old ones for display.

Here is a shot I took of our vintage FUZZ display which I put out for a documentary film that came out in 2007.

Office

I seem to spend most of my time in this room, unfortunately! I'm here about 7 hours a day answering EMAILs and doing &^%!ing paperwork/accounting. I wish I could be working on pedals and playing guitar... anyone want an office job? My PC is old but I got a DSL connection in November of 2001 finally!!!


Guitar Shows

We love attending guitar shows like the Philly show in this picture. It is a LOT of work and money so we do not attend many but we will try to get to as many as possible. Here Mike is holding his compROSSor and Chorus pedals.

Now that many vintage and high end guitars are too expensive for most people to collect, it leaves vintage and boutique effects as a good, enjoyable alternative. And they take up a lot less room under the bed! While vintage and boutique effects are often more expensive than a new mass-produced pedal, you will not lose money on them like most pedals which are usually worth half of what you paid once you plug them in. I have bought/traded many vintage pedals back from customers for their full purchase price as they are worth more every year. Our Analog Man brand pedals often sell on Ebay for more than they cost new. We, like Gibson, Rolex, Mercedes, etc don't sell our own products new on ebay. Sometimes they go for much higher than new, on pedals with a waiting list. So Analog Man pedals are an excellent investment. Handmade pedals like ours are easily repaired by anyone, as there are no special proprietary parts used, and construction is clean and simple. Most of the mass produced (usually Chinese made) pedals are disposeable, as the parts are unavailable or impractical to change. Even the majority of "boutique" pedals are now made at three big factories by robots now. So even though a US-made handbuilt pedal like ours may cost a little more up front, it will often be cheaper in the long run and certainly keep more resale value.

Why are some of Analog Man's prices a bit higher than sketchypedals.com or the big chain store in the strip mall?

We have been lowering prices so now most of our pedals are sold for the minimum price allowed by the manufacturers, making us very competitive on pricing. If you see lower prices somewhere, it might be good to check if they are an authorized dealer and sell with a manufacturures warrantee. Most effects dealers "guitar pedals dot coms" simply work out of a corner of their bedroom with no overhead and no way for a customer to check things out, while we have a large modern facility (with a clean restroom!). We also have a fully equipped workshop for repairs and mods, and separate rooms for our office equipment and storage. We have our store in the highest traffic area of the town, 1/2 mile from the highway. This allows us access to a lot of great services, and makes it easy for you to find us. When you buy a pedal from us, you are helping the economy in many ways as we buy products and services from many companies - printers, circuit board houses, accountants, shipping companies, storage companies, magazines (ads), graphic artists, metal manufacturers, utilities, painting shops, machine shops, board designers, electronic distributors, insurance companies, internet companies, etc, most of which are not needed by people selling pedals on the side. We are also not a huge company run by investors with the real work done at minimum wage. And we don't have to tell you that our service is the fastest and best in the world, just ask anyone who has actually dealt with us. For these reasons I hope you can realize the benefits of buying from Analog Man.

Please email rather than calling if possible as that allows us to help many more people per hour. I hope you can feel you are getting your money's worth with our personal service and expertise which is second to none. And our prices have been lowered to be VERY competitive with any legitimate dealer, if you are buying a few pedals we will do our best to match other stores' prices. We always try to sell at the manufacturer's Minimum Advertised Price (MAP).

aNaLoG.MaN History

Mike became interested in Vintage Guitars when he worked in Japan for almost a year in 1985 and saw the great vintage guitar shops (and prices!) in Japan. He worked in Japan as a software engineer on transistor test systems in Tachikawa and visited Tokyo often, where his girlfriend and future wife and pedal-builder Analog Ayako (RIP) lived.

Mike was able to find many vintage guitars in the northeast USA before vintage guitars got as popular in the USA as they were in Japan. After the vintage guitar boom in the USA, effects were still relatively easy to find so Mike started concentrating on effects. He studied them for several years, while finding and selling vintage effects, but the popular ones (Fuzzfaces, TS-808s, etc) were VERY hard to find and super expensive. And it was interesting that some old pedals sounded great while other identical examples were lousy... a lot of studying resulted. Soon Mike started making some of these himself, to meet the demand for vintage pedals at a better price and higher quality than the originals. Most of the Analog Man pedals were first built to meet the demand for these vintage icons when there were no alternatives available (TS9/808, Clone chorus, Comprossor, etc).

In the early '90s, Mike learned about the tube screamer history, and studied the circuits and learned how to modify a TS9 into a TS-808. There was no internet or books so he did the research himself. He finally found some of the JRC4558D chips in Akihabara, Tokyo at one of the small electronics shacks near the train station. They were 50 Yen each so he bought as many as he could afford. When he got back to the USA he modified TS9 pedals for friends, and a few people on this new thing called the INTERNET (usenet and email lists at the time, no www). Everyone was crazy about the sounds and a market was born for the modified ts9/808, as Ibanez had just reissued the TS9. Since this modification market was created by Mike many people have jumped on the bandwagon and there are all sorts of mods being performed now all over the world.

Mike started about the 3rd web site in the world with guitar effects, while there were only a handful of guitar sites at that time and none from the major manufacturers. His real job was a software engineer, having graduated from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY, with a BS in CS and more than enough courses in Electrical Engineering to get a minor in EE. So computers were easy to use and he could program the web site with a text editor (He still does, the website is vintage!).

In 2000 Mike started full time with Analog Man, and soon got a working relationship with Dave Fox of FOXROX electronics who together perfected Dave's creation of the Captain Coconut. Analog Man now offers handmade Chorus pedals, compROSSors, Juicers, Sun Faces, Astro Tone fuzz, Peppermint Fuzz, Beano Boosts, Sun Lions, King Of Tone pedals, ARDX20 delay, buffers, and custom A-B, true bypass, and other switching boxes in addition to custom projects and mods. There are many other projects on the burner... keep in touch!

Guitar Magazine did a nice interview in 2019, you can read it HERE .

ToneQuest report interviews Analog Mike!

Read the 2001 interview by clicking on the line above. Also check out the tonequest web site for much more. I highly recommend this magazine for the ultimate in guitarists, guitars, amps, effect, etc with none of the hype like the guitar mags you pick up on the newsstands.