Ask any guitarist and they’ll tell you how the stompboxes and settings on their pedalboards are as individual as their fingerprints. After all, the nuances of the effects, along with their choice of amp and instrument, ensure the music plays with all its intended shading and personality.

Since the 1960s, distortion, fuzz and other effects have become integrated into the DNA of rock ‘n’ roll, with generations of guitarists finding inspiration in Keith Richard’s fuzz on the Rolling Stone’s 1965 hit, “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” and the distortion on The Jimi Hendrix Experience’s “Purple Haze.” For decades, analog pedals ruled the marketplace. But, since the advent of digital technology, a wide range of pedals with components hardwired to a circuit board have found a tremendous following, igniting an ongoing debate between those with a die-hard preference for analog pedals and proponents of their digital counterparts.

We recently spoke with Tom Cram, who began working for DOD in 1996 and now heads up DigiTech and DOD, the digital and analog pedal brands from HARMAN Professional Solutions. A guitarist since his early teens, Tom continually develops new pedals of both varieties, while reinventing the classics.

“Each platform, digital and analog, has its strong and weak points,” said Tom. “For example, for fuzz, nothing beats analog. There are probably very few guitarists out there who would argue with that. Distortion pedals, some envelope filters and things like that also really shine in the analog world. However, nothing analog can get near a digital sampler or a looper. You can’t even make an analog looper, so there are certain designs and effects—modulation and delay—that are better in the digital world. A lot of the pedals I’ve brought back to the DOD line in the last few years are tailored to work with analog strengths.”

Still, many digital pedals, including numerous DigiTech boxes, emulate analog pedals. “The interesting thing about digital,” said Tom, “is that since converters have gotten to where they are, and our expertise is where it’s at, we’re able to make digital pedals sound very organic. I know that’s an intangible word, but it’s a word guitarists use a lot. To a certain extent, we’re now able to make digital pedals behave more like analog pedals. For example, our latest digital delay is called the Obscura, and its whole purpose is to sound like different analog delays, even though it’s 100 percent digital. We have little tricks based on our experience to make it sound like a tape delay or an analog delay. We even have a setting called Lo-Fi that really sounds like an old analog delay. Saying that, the sound of analog delays using actual BBDs [bucket brigade devices] is hard to fully capture digitally. It takes some serious effort but can be done.”

“With our iStomp pedal, I feel we created the best sounding digital fuzz out there. Still, it doesn’t react precisely the same as an analog fuzz, and it doesn’t clean up with the volume on a guitar like an analog fuzz, so there are inherent limitations that can’t be overcome in digital with the technology we have right now,” he said.

We asked Tom what the point is in trying to recreate analog pedal sounds digitally and learned that chips like BBDs are difficult to source. “It’s a pretty obsolete technology and, while there are a couple companies reproducing some of those old chips, they’re hard to find. When you do, they’re very expensive. In some cases, it’s easier and cheaper to replicate analog behavior in a digital format,” he said.

“With the iStomp, it made sense, because it was a platform that already existed, and we were able to create a fuzz algorithm to work within it. However, designing a digital fuzz pedal from the ground up usually doesn’t make sense. One of the most famous analog fuzzes has a grand total of eight parts. So, using a chip to replace eight parts would be silly.”

Until a few years ago, DOD was still using digital technology. But, in order to send a clear message to the market, Tom decided to completely separate DigiTech from DOD. “Although I might blur it a little bit with digitally controlled analog, I’ve drawn a pretty bright line, so DOD is 100 percent analog and DigiTech is 100 percent digital,” he said.

Like many guitarists, Tom has a personal soft spot in his heart for analog pedals. “That’s actually what got me started here with DOD. I was working in artist relations for DigiTech, and we were heavily into digital everything with very few analog pedals. The analog pedals we did have were being phased out, which was counter to what my guitarist friends wanted and counter to the information I was receiving at tradeshows,” he said. “That was about seven years ago and, at the time, I had been tinkering with older analog circuits, doing some mods to them on my kitchen table. Eventually, the opportunity came up for me to show some of the HARMAN execs the modifications and modded circuits I’d been working on and their response was, ‘Why aren’t we doing this?’ So we started. It was a long haul and took a lot of work to make it happen, but it essentially started on my kitchen table.”

While Tom no longer tinkers at his kitchen table, there are still pedals he looks forward to finding the time to work on. “There was a list of personal goals I wanted to hit when I took over DigiTech, including a couple of older pedals I still want to either revisit or reinvent. One of those is the Space Station, a pedal we originally released in the mid-‘90s. It was way ahead of its time and didn’t do very well but, through the years, guitarists started seeking it out, and the pedal now fetches ridiculous prices on eBay. One of my goals is to do a new version of it.”

Many thanks to Tom for sharing his insights into analog and digital effect pedal technology! Are you a guitarist with a preference for analog or digital pedals? Share your insights in the comments.

2 comments

  1. adam charlton

    Great article! Really helped me understand a lot about digital and analog!!

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