Jim Weider

Jim Weider provided Rich Robinson of the Black Crowes with an Analog Man King of Tone Overdrive pedal at Levon Helm's studio in Woodstock, as noted on Analogman's website.

"Here are Jim and Mike checking out some pedals at Analog Man. Jim had fun playing some of the cool old fuzzes like the Roland Bee Baa!"

Featured on the official product page of Analog Man’s King of Tone.

Jim had been using an original TS-808 for well over 20 years, it's now housed in a 1980s TS9 case after Rick Danko stepped on it at a concert that THE BAND played. Jim likes the tone of his TS-808, but has always found it loses some low end and is a bit too heavy in the mids. I also love TS808s and have sold thousands of TS9s with our TS808 mods. But sometimes I have wished for a less compressed, more open and natural sound with more of the guitar's actual tone, or as Jim says "you can hear the note better". A Tube Screamer makes it easier to play and sound good due to the compression and vocal midrange boost, but a master player like Jim would often prefer less coloration to allow his techniques and superb tone to get through.

A good friend of ours suggested the old Marshall Blues breaker pedal might work for Jim, so we found one on ebay and I had it sent to Jim who said it was pretty good. So I got another one on ebay and modified it quickly with some improved parts for a baseline test. I brought it up to Woodstock and Jim's sounded better, I was surprised! Then I opened Jim's up and saw that it was already modified heavily!! I thought he was playing a joke on me, but he just laughed, someone sold it on eBay like that. I tried those mods but didn't like them much, so we totally redid the circuit with different diodes, chips, capacitors, treble trimpots, modes- pretty much everything was changed. And of course the KOT is two pedal circuits in one box. So our KOT pedal is not much like, and does not sound much like a BB pedal anymore. Especially the clean or distortion modes are different, and the higher gain option changes it even more, making it more useful throughout the DRIVE knob range. We used the higher gain KOT circuit as the base for the Prince Of Tone which came out in 2012, and improved the DISTORTION mode also on the POT.