ROB WARMOWSKI: Hi. My name is Rob Warmowski, and I produced a video you're about to see for Gearwire.Com. The Barge Concept BP-1 guitar pedal is a clone or an attempt to mimic an original fuzz distortion pedal called the Interfax HP-1.

The HP-1 has been in use for years by a guitarist by the name of Steve Albini, Chicago-based guitarist and studio owner, and I knew this and so I congtacted Steve to see if he would be interested in hearing the BP-1 clone to the HP-1 original, which he agreed to do, and that's exactly what we did. And one thing I want to make sure everybody understands is we got different results than Steve got when we tested the BP-1 ourselves under different conditions with different guitars and different gain structure and amplifiers. But that said, let's take a look and see what Steve Albini was able to do with the BP-1 pedal.

STEVE ALBINI: The nice thing about the Harmonic Percolator is it can be set to fairly extreme levels of clipping without completely obliterating the fundamental, and I think that's because of the asymmetrical clipping thing that was talking about.

I wish I had a chalkboard right here because (1) it would be a really good visual, and (2) I could draw a little waveform and show you what I was talking about. But -- and the other nice thing that's nice about the Harmonic Percolator, and I think that's why it got the name Harmonic Percolator, if you stroke harmonics on the guitar rather than the fretted note, those are much lowe electrical signal coming out of the pickup, but the Harmonic Percolator has enough gain that it can make those like sort of compete in volume with your normal plucked notes.

We'll listen to the original recipe and I'll show you what this new box sounds like.

ROB WARMOWSKI: Sounds good.

STEVE ALBINI: This is an Interfax Harmonic Percolator. It's been around the world a couple of times, and this is an actual made by the crazy dude in Milwaukee, Interfax Harmonic Percolator. There are several iterations of this device. There's a -- there were those that were made by the crazy dude himself. There are those that were assembled from parts left by the crazy dude after he died, and those were made by a guitar shop called the Rock House in Milwaukee, and there are several people who have done what they consider recreations of the Harmonic Percolator, but this is the one that I started out with and this is what I'm used to.

So this is a single-coil guitar [STEVE STRUMS A GUITAR CHORD] played by itself without the Harmonic Percolator.

[STEVE PLAYS GUITAR CHORD AND RIFFS WITH THE HARMONIC PERCOLATOR BYPASSED]

And here's a harmonic on it.

[STEVE PLAYS A NATURAL HARMONIC WITH THE HARMONIC PERCOLATOR BYPASSED]

That's a root harmonic and this is a clean harmonic.

[STEVE PLAYS ANOTHER NATURAL HARMONIC WITH THE HARMONIC PERCOLATOR BYPASSED]

And this is the Harmonic Percolator.

[STEVE PLAYS GUITAR CHORD, RIFFS, AND HARMONICS WITH THE HARMONIC PERCOLATOR ENGAGED]

One of the nicest things about the Harmonic Percolator is that if you don't feel like playing guitar for a while, the Harmonic Percolator will do it for you, which is, you know, one of the reasons that I use it. If I turn the output of the amplifier up a little bit, and it has a pretty good acoustic feedback through the pickups that is the pickup through the feedback -- the acoustic feedback through the pickups as microphones will drive the Percolator just as well as a plucked note will like [STEVE PLAYS A NOTE]. The whistling that you get from this distortion pedal seems to be more controllable and more useable than a lot of other distortion pedals like the -- just the microphonic feedback seems to be more useful.

[STEVE ALBINI DEMONSTRATING USE OF MICROPHONIC FEEDBACK WITH THE HARMONIC PERCOLATOR]

And that was without me having to touch a string, so that's a labor-saving device. It's tremendous.

This is one of the Barge Concepts pedals. We have two versions -- two iterations of the circuit. I don't know how different they are. There are two knobs on the far left called drive and output. I have no idea what those do so I've turned those all the way down. I tried turning them up and it didn't seem to make any difference. And I -- in any case, I believe that the red light on the drive button means that that's disengaged. When I use the Harmonic Percolator, it has two controls, balance and harmonics and I have both of them all the way up. By that I mean the harmonics is the distortion generation; I have that at maximum, and the balance is the blend between the distortion signal and the clean signal, and I have that turned all the way up as well. That's my normal usage of the pedal as for sort of sound effect, and so that's the way I've got this set. There appears to a difference in range because the output of this pedal doesn't sound very much like the Harmonic Percolator I'm used to. I'll show you what I mean.

[STEVE ALBINI PLAYING GUITAR RIFFS AND TRYING OUT FEEDBACK EFFECTS WITH THE BARGE CONCEPTS BP-1].

The whistling microphonic feedback, it doesn't seem to be working as well. The low frequency content doesn't seem to be as preserved and just the general tone has kind of a raspier quality to it. This may be intended to simulate a version of the Harmonic Percolator that is not identical to the one that I own. The one that I own was, as I said, one that was sold by the original crazy dude from the Interfax company in Milwaukee, and this one may be simulating one of the many variations on the circuit. I don't know.

I'm going to fiddle around with it a little and see if I can get it to more closely mimic the original Harmonic Percolator here.

[STEVE ALBINI ATTEMPTING TO MAKE THE BARGE CONCEPTS BP-1 EMULATE THE HARMONIC PERCOLATOR MORE CLOSELY].

You'll see that it -- there's some sort of a high-frequency resonance in this pedal that doesn't exist in the original Harmonic Percolator, and I can't seem to tune it out, so I'm going to try another version of this.

[STEVE ALBINI ATTEMPTING TO MAKE ANOTHER VERSION OF THE BARGE CONCEPTS BP-1 EMULATE THE HARMONIC PERCOLATOR MORE CLOSELY].

This version of the pedal that is this particular item, I don't know if it has any actual differences in components or topology from between this pedal and the other pedal, in this one the horrible sound seems a little bit more at bay and it seems a little bit closer to the original Harmonic Percolator, but it still has this veneer of very brittle high frequency horrible sound. I can imagine certain Japanese friends of mine who would be really into that sound and where about, you know, they could -- and they could conceivably base a career around it. For me, I'm used to the sound of my old, reliable Harmonic Percolator, and I don't that this pedal would be a suitable substitute. If you're into that sort of crazy distortion but you also want a little bit of horrible on top of it, then I would think this pedal would be your money.

One thing I've noticed about the Harmonic Percolator in use is that it is extraordinarily sensitive to the low that's presented to the input side of the pedal. That is if your guitar has low-impedance or relatively low-impedance output pickups, the circuit behaves differently than if you have high-impedance pickups. Let's say if you have a Les Paul that's got two fat big coils on it, the distortion character is quite a bit different than if you have, say a Telecaster, which has one relatively small coil, and there may be something about the interface of the guitar and the circuit that if you try to do anything extra fancy to it, screws up that balance, like for example there's an extra circuit in the Barge Concepts pedal: the drive circuit. It has the drive and the output. I don't know what that does, but if that comes prior to the input, if that comes prior to the distortion amplifier, there's a possibility that that has changed the loading my pickups would present to the distortion circuit. You know, they look like they're smart guys so they probably figured that out.

There may also be a feedback circuit inside the pedal. I don't know. I haven't looked at the schematic. If there's a feedback circuit inside the pedal, it would also be sensitive to output loading, that is depending on what amplifier you plug it into, the feedback circuit would behave differently. And if they put an output buffer after the distortion circuit, then it would insulate that distortion circuit from the output load of the amplifier that it's plugged into.

There are a lot of sort of -- a lot of possible culprits with respect to the horrible sound, and it could be something as simple as my particular guitar loading that particular input circuit behaves differently than my particular loading the Harmonic Percolator or the Pussyfoot.