From vintage dealing to a Connecticut workshop.

Analogman is the pedal company of Mike Piera, who signs his emails and his website “Analog Mike.” Its roots are in buying and selling old equipment rather than in designing new circuits. In a 2019 interview with Guitar.com, Piera said he first used the name Analog Man in 1993, selling vintage effects, guitars and amplifiers at the first Classic American Guitar show on Long Island, New York, and through advertisements in Vintage Guitar magazine. The company’s own history says it began as “Analog Man Vintage guitar effects before the boutique pedal industry started.”

Piera trained as a software engineer. Guitar.com reports that he took a computer-science degree at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, studying electrical engineering alongside it, and then worked in Japan in the mid-1980s. The company’s website says he spent almost a year there in 1985, working on transistor test systems in Tachikawa, and that Tokyo’s vintage-guitar shops showed him how highly American instruments were prized. He told Guitar.com that he sold US guitars on consignment through a Tokyo dealer, then turned to effects pedals as good guitars became harder to find.

The workshop grew out of modification. In the early 1990s, the company says, Piera worked out how to turn Ibanez’s reissued TS9 Tube Screamer into the more sought-after TS-808, buying the JRC4558D chips it needed in Tokyo’s Akihabara electronics district, and shared the modification on Usenet and email lists before the web was widespread. His first hand-built pedal, he told Guitar.com, was a chorus modelled on the Electro-Harmonix Small Clone, followed by the CompROSSor compressor, based on the Ross design. Midway through 2000 he went full-time, “in the same Connecticut location where the company remains today,” Guitar.com wrote. The company’s current website gives that location as Bethel, Connecticut, and its copyright line runs from 2000.

A dual overdrive with a waiting list measured in years.

Analogman’s best-known product is the King of Tone, a two-channel overdrive developed with Jim Weider, the guitarist who played with The Band. The company says the design began as a modified Marshall Bluesbreaker pedal, but that almost everything was then changed — diodes, chips, capacitors, trim pots and modes — and that it was tuned against Weider’s 1960s Fender Deluxe Reverb to sound like a valve amplifier pushed into natural distortion. Each King of Tone is two overdrive circuits in one box, with red and yellow LEDs marking the two sides.

The company’s own pages give slightly different dates. Its home page says the pedal was introduced at the Philadelphia guitar show in autumn 2003 and shipped from early 2004; its waiting-list page says it was first sold in November 2003. The current six-knob Version 4 followed about a dozen five-knob Version 3 pedals: ten prototypes were made in October 2005 and sales restarted in spring 2006, the company says. A higher-gain option arrived in 2009, and the single-channel Prince of Tone, built on the higher-gain circuit, in 2012.

Demand outran production almost at once. The company keeps a free waiting list rather than taking deposits, and in September 2026 its page said it was shipping to people who had joined on or before 24 July 2019 — a wait of about seven years, by its own account. Since 2016 it has limited customers to four King of Tone pedals each, it says, “because too many people are selling them for a profit,” and it warns that discontinued parts mean it may never build enough for everyone on the list. Guitar.com reported in 2019 that the King of Tone had been the company’s biggest seller overall.

The rest of the range draws on classic circuits: the Sun Face fuzz, which Guitar.com said could be ordered in 2,800 combinations with more than 20 transistor choices; the Beano Boost, Sun Lion, Astro Tone and Peppermint Fuzz; the Juicer and Bi-Comp compressors; the Mini Chorus and Bi-Chorus, added in 2005, the company says; and the ARDX20 dual analog delay. Players Guitar.com named as users include Mike Rutherford, Steve Hackett, Ed O’Brien, Brad Whitford, Noel Gallagher and Steve Rothery; the company says the first King of Tone went to Whitford for Aerosmith’s 2003–2004 US tours.

Design and documentation.

The seven makers in this group are smaller pedal companies, some building analogue circuits by hand, some writing their own digital processing. Five are American, one Canadian and one English.

Analogman is Mike Piera’s workshop in Bethel, Connecticut, where the Connecticut Mirror reported in 2024 that he has worked full-time since about 2000. Source Audio says it was founded in Woburn, Massachusetts, in 2006; in July 2026 the companies announced that it had become part of Ernie Ball, the string maker.

Meris, which Terry Burton, formerly of Strymon, told Guitar.com he started in 2013, says its pedals are designed and built in California. Red Panda says it began in 2009 and assembles every pedal in its metro Detroit workshop. Old Blood Noise Endeavors lists a shop in Oklahoma City, and Guitar World reported in 2025 that its pedals are hand-made at its Oklahoma headquarters.

Fairfield Circuitry says it has worked since 2008 and does all its manufacturing in Hull, Québec. Origin Effects, founded by Simon Keats, says it hand-builds its pedals in Buckingham, England; the UK company register lists Keats as its controlling shareholder.

Apart from Source Audio, we found no record of an outside owner for any of these companies, and much of what is said about where their pedals are made comes from the companies themselves.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it, and what it says about where its products are made — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Built to order, and still independent.

We found no record of Analogman being sold. In the sources we checked — the company’s websites, Guitar.com and Dunlop’s product pages — there is no acquisition or outside investor; the business trades as Analog Man, LLC, and its 2026 home page says Piera is “really busy running things.” It is also a dealer and repair shop: it describes itself as perhaps the only business that “manufactures, modifies, buys, sells, and repairs vintage, new, and custom guitar effects,” and it still runs its original, hand-coded website alongside the buyanalogman.com store it added in 2007.

On manufacturing, the company says its pedals are “Hand made in the USA,” and contrasts them with mass-produced pedals and with boutique brands it says are now built in big factories. Guitar.com described the same model in 2019: pedals are built after the order arrives, at the Connecticut shop, which is why so many options are offered. “We don’t have our pedals on shelves ready to ship,” Piera told the magazine. Its best-known tie to a large maker is with Dunlop: the MXR Duke of Tone, which Dunlop says was “designed in conjunction with indie pedal builder Analog Man” and is based on the Prince of Tone. That pedal carries the MXR name and is sold by Dunlop.

For a design guide, Analogman shows how a small maker’s identity can come from scarcity and an old-fashioned website as much as from a logo: hand-built boxes, two coloured LEDs and a waiting list that has become part of the product. Compare MXR, its partner on the Duke of Tone, and Fulltone, which Piera named as one of the biggest early boutique brands. For this guide we use workshop brown, overdrive red and LED amber with a slab serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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