Analogman Prince of Tone
Analogman is probably most famous for their King of Tone pedal. At the time I’m writing this (March 2025), they are shipping orders for the KoT that have been placed in December 2018. So if you order yours today, expect it some time in 2033. But this is not the King, this is the Prince of Tone. What’s different? First of all, the King of Tone is two pedals in one enclosure and the Prince of Tone is only half of that. Then, while the KoT pedals are made in the US, the PoT is assembled in China. Analogman claims that no cheap parts go into these and only the finest chips and diodes from Japan that are used in the KoT are used here, too. They are soldered by hand, just by cheaper labor.
Since the Prince of Tone is based on the King of Tone, looking into the King’s history makes sense.
In a nutshell, the creators of the pedal where Tubescreamer users that wanted a better pedal than a Tubescreamer. So they tried an old Marshall Blues Breaker pedal, which was heavily modded, and liked it better, but still wanted more, so they basically replaced everything and tweaked it. The goal was something like a Tubescreamer but with less compression and less focus on the mids.
The Marshall Blues Breaker pedal was released in 1991, did not sell very well and was discontinued.
That pedal was aiming to capture the sound of the Blues Breaker amp, specifically the Marshall 1962, the 2×12 combo amp that Eric Clapton used when he played with John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers.
That combo amp was itself based on the Fender Bassman. This is where the link ends, the Bassman was not based on any other thing, because it was the first amplifier designed to go with the newly invented Fender Precision Bass.
But let’s get back to the Analogman Prince of Tone and look at what we got here.
Essentially, it is one half of a King of Tone, as I said, but with the difference that you get not only your three knobs (Gain, Level, Tone), but also a three way toggle switch that lets you select between boost, overdrive and distortion. Analogman does not specify how what it is exactly that this switch does, but they describe the modes as follows: The OD mode is the standard KoT sound, a little less drive than a Tube Screamer but more volume on tap. The Boost mode is a cross between an overdrive and a clean boost, and the distortion sound has higher gain and hard(er) clipping.
Hidden on the inside are three more controls. A little bank with two dip switches. One controls a boost in the low mids, the other is called turbo mode and gets you more gain and more compression.
Then, there is another rotary encoder which controls a treble boost.
The pedal itself looks and feels primo. There’s nothing to complain about, materials and workmanship are solid, the finish is just like the US made Analogman pedals I’ve handled. Let’s plug it in.
And while we get to the hands (and ears) on part, let me start with a question:
How, in the nine hells, can a pedal, based on another pedal, based on an amp, based on the first bass amp there was sound so anemic? When I tested the Tube Screamer for the first time, It somehow managed to hide the fact that it cuts lows for quite some time. I liked what I was getting and while the low end did not sound fat, it sounded alright to my ear, until I did some A/B testing where I was confronted with the fact that the other pedals sound so much bigger. Analogman claims that the KoT does not cut as much low end as the Tube Screamer does, so I expected a better result here.
Judging only from my gut feeling, this is worse, though.
The three way switch is somewhat less effective of what I’m used to. I’d say if you set it to Distortion, you get about as much gain as a Tubescreamer has.
Set to OD, you get about half of that, and boost is again half. So you’re going from a low gain overdrive to a somewhat lower gain overdrive to an even lower gain overdrive. I guess when you’re sitting with your vintage or custom shop strat in front of your Dumble, you can enjoy the finer nuances of the tonal spectrum revealed through this. I would go on and crack disrespecting jokes towards the players of the six string octave up bass guitar and their search for the perfect tones, but then I have a look at my pedal collection and shut up.
Or do I?
Let’s establish that the PoT is probably a great pedal on guitar and I am doing the equivalent of judging a Bugatti Veyron for its qualities of dragging a tree stump from the earth, then proceeding to laugh at it because the 16.4 has 1001 horse power, but cannot do what a Porsche Diesel A 133 can totally manage with 32 horsepower. I mean – put both on a track and the Bugatti smokes the Porsche in any way imaginable, since the A 133 has a top speed of 28kph.
But I’m bass playing folk. We are simple people. We use our gear to pull tree stumps, and we laugh at gear that gets stuck in the mud, even if it is able to perform magnificently in other disciplines.
So having a switch to go from a hint of drive to two hints of drive to three hints of drive, when being used to switches like on the Subspace or the MBD-2, where a solid +20dB are applied and you go from slightly driven to booyaka! Ouch ouch, my ears are bleeding! …. well, let’s say the Guitar folk might wonder why the Porsche A 133 has five forward gears when its top speed is less than a third of what a Veyron reaches in first gear.
But if we’re completely honest here, I must say that even when I hooked up the Broughton FFXL and toyed around with the filters until I had the balance just right, It was still incredibly boring to use the PoT. That setup took care of the main issue and the lows were back. Now I’m using two expensive pedals to achieve a goal of … a bland sound. Imagine Gordon Ramsay tasting a dish, looking disappointed, slightly shaking his head and then just leaving the room without a word.
I’m torn between:
A) My mechanical keyboard has switches that have a lifespan of 50 million keystrokes each. Every sentence written about this thing is wasting what precious little they have left.
B) Someone who makes fun of a pedal such as this is someone who pushes a person in a wheelchair down a set of stairs and laughs at them bouncing about. I don’t want to be that someone.
Let’s put the verdict like this:
If you’re a bass player and you like what I like, then don’t bother.