ASTRO TONE Fuzz

Analog Man's first new pedal of 2010 is the ASTRO TONE fuzz. This pedal is based on the 1960's SAM ASH FUZZZ BOXX and ASTROTONE FUZZ made in New York City in 1966-68 by the Astro Amp company. Analog Mike had a NOS Astro Tone fuzz back in the 90s, here is a copy of the manual that he saved from it.

Here is the old ASTROTONE, a dark grey pedal.

Here is a link to this old ASTROTONE FUZZ pedal that Mike repaired for a customer, showing the insides of the pedals.

This was the first pedal that Analogmike cloned, way back in about 1994. Mine was really a clone, down to the artwork on the board and the board mounted pots. Still works very well! I met Gene Cornish from The Rascals at at the Long Island, NY Classic American Guitar show in the mid 90's where I brought this prototype pedal. Gene told me that he was using one in the 60s and Leslie West saw him use it. The next time they met, he saw that Leslie was using TWO of them in line! Ira Stone, who played with and knew Leslie back then (and came to my shop to check out some pedals recently) confirmed this, saying "Leslie used two Sam Ash fuzz tones in line many times with the Vagrants".

Analogmike finally got an engineer, John Foege, from Georgia Tech, to help with some of the time-consuming design work (board layout, testing, etc) so this was a great first project. He used some nice software to design the board, and it came out great. After this, we have a few new distortion pedals that John is working on and they should be done much faster.

The picture at the left is computer generated simulation, not a real picture of our board.

Here is the actual inside of the pedal.

The Analog Man ASTRO TONE is not quite the same as the old pedals. I took our first prototype, made to 100% original specs, to play with my power trio. At the shop we compared it to an original and the sound was exactly the same. But I did not like it, I could not hear it well with the band, it was not thick enough. The problem with the original design was that there was very little low end, the sound was quite thin. You REALLY had to crank up the volume on it to get a good sound. But this would make the ON sound too much louder than the OFF sound for live use. And the tone knob was really limited in the useful range. So we took the circuit and with some modern software analyzed it and found out how we could retain the low end, and make the tone control somewhat more useful. But we made sure that we could still get the EXACT sounds of the original pedal if that was desired. By turning the tone knob up higher, you can still get the original sounds which are good into a large, cranked amp. But we made it so that it now sounds awesome even into a little amp like a Fender Deluxe Reverb, at near unity gain on the pedal.

I found several hundred original Astrotone transistors about ten years ago, and have been saving them. They even have the same 1966 date codes on them as my original pedals! You can see "641" in the picture which means the 41st week of 1966. They are little plastic, flat, pill shaped Fairchild transistors. They have gold plated leads - they were made back in the days when gold was cheap and transistors were expensive! These transistors are pretty consistent, and usually well behaved, but we have do discard some that are too noisy for a fuzz pedal. We should be able to make a few hundred of these pedals with original, excellent transistors.

Many people have problems using a Fuzz Face type pedal, like our Sunface, live with a band. I had the same problem which is one reason we are making these pedals, it’s something I need to get the sounds I want. I play Fender amps with a Les Paul, which is not too favorable to fuzz face pedals. But this pedal works great with that setup.

The sound is not as compressed as a Fuzz Face, not SUPER thick and saturated, something between a fuzz and distortion. It’s fuzzier into a smaller amp (Fender Deluxe), and more of a BOOSTER into a large distorted amp (Marshall 1970s Super Lead). It can also be stacked with other pedals, for example running a fuzz face into it can get a sound like Spirit in the Sky, which buzzes and cuts out. Or run the Astro Tone into an OD pedal like a TS808 or KoT to make it fatter.

Features:

1. True Bypass switching
2. Super Bright LED for lower power use, buffed so as not to blind you!
3. Uses less than 1 mA of power when off, only 3 when on, so an Alkaline bat tery will last a few hundred hours of normal playing time.
4. Three simple knobs - Volume, Fuzz, and Tone.
5. High quality, hand wired RE’AN input and output jacks.
6. In and Out jacks on top for best pedalboard real estate management
7. Normal Boss style power jack, on the right side, negative ground so no polarity problems
8. original 1966 Fairchild Silicon transistors, not affected by heat like a Germanium fuzz.
9. Sound is not as compressed as a fuzzface, not SUPER thick and saturated, something between a fuzz and distortion but closer to a fuzz.

Sound Clips

Elton's Saturday Night AnalogMike's 59 reissue Les Paul into Astrotone into ARDX20 delay into a Deluxe Reverb reissue. Fuzz is up about 3:00 and tone about 12:00.

AnalogMan Astro Tone Fuzz from Doppler Demos on Vimeo.

Here are the above video clips in a longer audio format from Doug Doppler which will be on his GET KILLER TONE dvd series. First is a Les Paul into our ASTRO TONE into our Boss DD3 mod, into a 1963 Fender Vibrasonic. The first one shows the cleanup of the pedal with your volume knob, Hendrix-esque Neck Position : Astroman.

Here is another one, same setup, Classic Rock Bridge Position... Astrorock.

Gearmanndude!