Our Products

Every Asheville Music Tools product is a marriage of vintage audio processing techniques and advanced, high-tech electronics. Our tools are designed using sustainable processes and quality components for uncompromising sound quality, musical expression, features, and reliability.

When it comes to critical listening and attention to detail, nothing is off the table to get the sound just right with any source, from electric guitar to modular synthesizer. We tailor our sound path to exacting tolerances, carefully eliminate unwanted sonic artifacts, and chase down every dB of possibility. We incorporate extensive voltage control, expression pedal functionality, and under-the-hood options to expand the flexibility of our effect parameters far beyond the front panel. The resulting design complexity and component count greatly surpass that of a typical pedal.

We manufacture our products with robust processes and quality components for reliability that lasts a lifetime. We use precision, high-performance integrated circuits, passive parts, and other components throughout our products. Our designs are fully protected against power supply faults, electrostatic discharge (ESD), spikes, and over-voltage of the I/O. We take every measure possible to eliminate sources of noise and radio frequency interference (RFI), ensuring carefree operation in any studio or performance application. And we cram all of these features into a compact, rugged package.

Our Philosophy

At Asheville Music Tools we consider ourselves to be but humble toolmakers. Our mission is to give you:

Tools to inspire your creative muse

We believe in a rigorous, take-no-shortcuts approach to our work as engineers and artists. We take pride in our accomplishments, and we design our tools to be fun and intuitive to use. We want you to have a deep connection with our tools to inspire joy in the creative process.

Each tool we make is inspected twice during the production process: first by treating it as an electrical device and verifying the physical and electrical performance, and second by using it as a musical instrument, critically listening to every setting and function. This ensures that we deliver the highest standard of consistency and quality.

We are committed not just to quality, but also to integrity, our community and the planet. We use the most sustainable parts and processes we can find, avoiding any that are harmful to our environment. We protect our people by avoiding conflict minerals and materials. We work with local vendors and manufacturers whenever possible, many right here in the mountains of Western North Carolina. This guarantees quality, provides jobs to our community, and reduces the environmental impact of excessive shipping and transportation.

We support music and the arts in our local community and provide mentorships and learning assistance to young engineers and hobbyists learning in the field. We remember to take a moment to be present for newcomers who wish to grow and learn skills we have. And we place ethics, joy, love, health and quality of life before profit and growth.

Our Founder

Asheville Music Tools (AMpT) is founded by Rick “Hawker” Shaich. After a career as a design engineer for a well-known musical instrument manufacturer in the synthesizer field and for other companies, Hawker is venturing out to explore his creative freedom and bring a new generation of audio tools into the world.

Hawker is the hardware engineer behind some of the most sought-after analog effects in the industry. Many of these are now out of production and hard to obtain. If you are in the music world, you likely have used a device Hawker designed or worked on. It was that demand for his classics, previously designed for other companies, that motivated him to start creating and selling his own products.

Hawker has been interested in sound and electronics since building a DC motor from scratch as a pre-teen. Being unable to afford pedals for his guitar, he started building stomp boxes at the age of 12, building Craig Anderton and PAiA projects from salvaged TVs and military surplus parts. His addiction to electronics, circuit boards, soldering, PCB layout and vintage analog test equipment has taken him through a lifelong passion for electronic design with many audio companies including major players in the synthesizer, studio, effects and pedal markets.

When not designing electronics, Hawker lives in a small round house in the woods of Asheville North Carolina with his partner and his (once feral) cats. Hawker is originally from Minnesota, but moved to North Carolina in 1990 due to his love of the mountains, outdoors and the vibrant music, arts, and community minded culture there. He enjoys live music, camping, hiking and backpacking as well as carpentry, woodworking, and alternative energy and participates in the Rainbow Family gatherings where he enjoys cooking and applying his form of low tech/high tech backwoods technologies.

Our Co Conspirator

John Snyder, a Boston-based electrical engineer, befriended Hawker on DIY pedal and synth forums, where the two of them realized they were the only ones answering each others’ increasingly esoteric questions. From there they quickly bonded over their shared love of bucket brigade delays, obscure capacitor dielectrics, and exponential wave shapes. John is known for his own pedal company Electronic Audio Experiments, which specializes in unique analog and analog/digital hybrid effects. His experience in product development and marketing has been a valuable asset for Asheville Music Tools, where he serves as a sounding board for new products (and occasionally a bad influence on Hawker) and also assists with media and marketing.

John received his PhD in Electrical Engineering from Boston University in 2020, where he wrote his thesis on integrated quantum optics. Outside the lab John enjoys Dungeons & Dragons with his wife and friends, rock climbing, hiking with his dog, and playing guitar in the bands Verdigris and Ember Wreath.

Our Manufacturing Goddess

Based in Asheville, North Carolina (US), Liz Lang, A.K.A. Auracene is a composer, instrumentalist and vocalist who has worked extensively with music technology for the past 17 years.

At AMpT Liz is our manufacturing and QC goddess where she assembles, calibrates, tweaks, listens and coaxes AMpT's products to perfection before releasing them into the wild to create new sounds and inspiration. Her attention to detail and perfectionism ensures that you get your AMpT tools perfectly built to our specification.

Her experience poking at oscilloscopes while piloting cranky analog synths, creaky sound processors and boutique software, came into full play during her tenure at Moog Music. There she calibrated and tuned up their flagship products into sweet, thunderous tonality. When not hiking in the mountains, she enjoys bending and brandishing audio waveforms using any kind of electron spin-based gear for her secret other life of releasing sound and music on obscure European vinyl, CD, and cassette indie labels, plus a few film scores.  Find out more about Liz at https://www.stormylang.com/ or at Bandcamp or Soundcloud.

Our Lab Mouser
Picasso

Picasso lives in the AMpT lab and is our engineering lab hand and constant attention distraction who reminds us often to take a break and enjoy life (and her). She loves a good Digikey box and makes her nest in the Digikey packaging that lives under the lab bench by the sub woofer. She loves tuna fish, tissue paper, a new order from Digikey and is glad they don’t use the plastic that others do. All hail extruded recycled packaging for kittens (just google Digikey and Cat if you don’t believe us). While she is deeply aware of that other electronics company name that tries to attract cats with her mouse catching title, she is loyal to the packaging of their competitor. When not hanging in the lab she loves to play with her brother Bear Kitteh and Fuzz Face who live on the land with her.