“Instead of labouring over a perfect recreation, we decided to make an expanded counterpart”: Chase Bliss teams up with Mike Piera for Analog Man collab based on the legendary King Of Tone

Chase Bliss and Analog Man have joined forces for an epic expansion of the King Of Tone overdrive pedal.

Five years in the making, Brothers AM is a pedal that Chase Bliss founder, Joel Korte, could only dream of, and it is already one that the internet is calling the pedal collaboration of the year, maybe ever.

So what is all the fuss about? For starters, the Analog Man King Of Tone is one of the Holy Grail overdrive pedals, with a waiting list that would put Godot to shame. Designed by Mike Piera, built by hand, this drive pedal has been revised over the years but each iteration sells second-hand for crazy money. Expect to pay over $700 for a V4, over two grand for an early 2000s v2.

With a market running hot like that, it should be a surprise to no one that there are many King Of Tone clones on the market, and some art dirt cheap. Brothers AM is something way more than a clone.

Brothers AM – A collaboration with Analog Man - YouTube

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Besides, as Korte notes in his newsletter, there is no way to replicate the processes behind Piera’s pedal builds. The making-of documentary speaks to how personal this project was for all involved.

“After spending some time with Mike and touring around Analog Man HQ, the project clarified immediately,” writes Korte. “There’s no way to truly replicate Mike’s process, everything is simply too personal and hand-crafted (and made with finite, vintage NOS components). So we decided to focus on the aspects of the King of Tone that we could expand and take further. Instead of labouring over a perfect recreation, we decided to make an expanded counterpart.”

And expanded this is. It is a Chase Bliss speciality to create such a deep love letter to something analogue and then affix some robust digital architecture to the design to make it super-configurable, with MINI, presets, expression pedal and CV control. That configurability extends to the phalanx of dip switches aligned across the top of the unit.

Oh, it’s definitely playing with the King Of Tone styling; the enclosure is a similar shade of purple, the text in gold, and the signal path is all-analogue.

There are switchable modes here, plenty of diversity in the flavour of drive, an abundance of cool features for tweaking the sound. It even features a bonus mode culled from the Analog Man catalogue; a Beano Boost mode, which offers some vintage treblebooster fire.

There are switchable boost, overdrive and hard-clipping distortion modes. Chase Bliss presents this as a two-channel drive with a pair of identical circuits accessible via their own footswitch.

You can stack them. Use them individually. Whatever. There is a wide sweep of gain here. Lots of ways of configuring your electric guitar tone.

Available now, priced $399/€469, see Chase Bliss for more details.