Analysis

Next to the Klon, the Analogman King of Tone has some legendary hype attached to it (for a modern, boutique overdrive). You can't just buy a King of Tone. No, no, no, no. Well, okay, you can. But, if you want it from the manufacturer you'll have to get on a two year waiting list. That's right: two years of not rocking and not being able to one up the other axe-man in your band. I know this because I did it. I went on the list in Sept. 2006 and my name came up in Sept. 2008.

Of course, by that time the KOT had been traced by someone, and I had already built up my own version. But, I dutifully bought the unit when it came my turn. Mostly, because I wanted to compare how my clone stacked up against the real deal.

It was spot on! Actually, I liked mine a little better, and I think that was mostly due to component choice. I did not have the types of diodes on hand that the KOT uses, so I subbed with some other wierdos I found at MC Howard in Austin. Maybe that made the difference.

The effect itself is a medium gain overdrive with controlss for volume, tone and gain. Internally, there is a trimmer for presence boost (to brighten the effect up when used with darker sounding amps) and one 2 channel, 2 position dip switch per side. With the dip switches, you can select a clean boost by eliminating all diode clipping, or choose between the two sets of clipping diodes. You can also run both sets of diodes at the same time on each channel, but this is a bit of overkill.

The Aristocrat will compliment a wide range of amps and guitars, single or humbucker, and will provide a sweet, although somewhat generic, overdrive. My favorite settings are running channel A as a clean boost and channel B as dirt. With both channels engaged, you get a nice meaty overdriven sound due to the clean boost slamming the front end of the overdrive channel.

Additionally, you can wire the dip switches as external SPDT or SPST switches. This puts all the clipping control on the outside of the enclosure. I recommend doing this for at least one channel to get the best balance of usability vs. part count.

The stock unit uses two JRC4580D IC's. These are similar in sound to the JRC4558 and can subbed easily. I suggest socketing the IC's and running two different ones to get a little variety. I believe I ended up with a 4580 in one channel and an NE5532 in the other.

If you want to try a higher gain mod, you can sub a 250kB pot for the stock 100kB gain pot.