DAN AGOSTO: Hi. My name is Dan Agosto here for Gearwire.Com, and we're checking out the Barge Concepts BP-1, and this is supposed to be a remake of the Interfax Harmonic Percolator made famous by Steve Albini in his band Shellac most famously.

So, it's a bit different than the other pedal, and if you watched our video that we actually did with Mr. Albini at his studio, in the situation that we put it in, it actually didn’t perform too well. Well I've had a chance to actually play a lot more -- spend a lot more time with the BP-1 and actually I found it to be quite nice for sort of a medium distortion, and you can also push it up there but it gets a little wild, not really what I like from a distortion pedal, but if we keep it low, I actually really like it. So let's -- without further ado, let's listen to some of the sounds.

I'm playing a Rickenbacker 360, Maple Glow, and we have the Peavey Valve King that's on the clean channel, and it's mic'ed up with an SM57 and an AKG 414 XL2. All right, I'm going to turn the pedal off and listen to what it sounds. I'm on the bridge pickup.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYS GUITAR THROUGH A PEAVEY VALVE KING WITH THE BP-1 BYPASSED]

All right. And now this is sort of a heavy distortion setting, not incredibly crunchy but if we look at the knobs, we have the harmonics and balance. They are two probably the most important knobs on this, and then our output is actually all the way down because this has a lot of gain. Our drive is at midnight but it's actually disengaged. You can turn it on and off with this, but I were to press this you'll hear raising the noise floor. We'll leave it off for now.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYS GUITAR THROUGH A PEAVEY VALVE KING WITH THE BP-1 ENGAGED]

Now, one thing I really like about this pedal is that it is -- on sustained notes, it has sort of a character to it that doesn't stay in one place. The harmonics change over time, especially like if -- say like the opening to "Foxy Lady" by Jimi Hendrix, I could just press down this fret and sort of do vibrato.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYS VIBRATO ON GUITAR THROUGH A PEAVEY VALVE KING WITH THE BP-1 ENGAGED]

You can hear that that sort of changes over time. So let's listen to a few opf the different sounds we can get out of this. First of all, let's examine these knobs a bit. Balance and Harmonics: These are sort of the most confusing of the bunch. One thing I've noticed that was interesting is that if we turn down the balance all the way [DAN STRUMS THE GUITAR], there's no sound coming out of the amp at all, and the same goes for the harmonics [DAN STRUMS THE GUITAR], nothing at all. But as we turn these up, if we bring the balance like straight up and we turn the harmonics up [DAN AUDITIONS HARMONICS PARAMETER SETTINGS], that's what the harmonics one does. I'm going to do the same with the balance one, so we have the harmonics straight up and we'll sweep the balance up. [DAN AUDITIONS BALANCE PARAMETER SETTINGS]

So it seems like the balance actually lends a bit more clean tone to it when you have it turned up, so this is sort of -- you can kind of think of this aas almost a gain knob, and the harmonics is actually sort of like a distortion, so if we have that up and the balance further down [DAN STRUMS GUITAR], we get a more saturated tone.

Now, the interesting about the Harmonic Percolator is that it's supposed to add even-order harmonics instead of -- a lot of distortion pedals and overdrive pedals add both even and odd harmonics. Odd harmonics are the ones generally associated with like if you're clipping a digital input, you'll get a lot of odd harmonics and it doesn't sound all that great and it squares off the waveform. Now, even-order harmonics, that's the sort of harmonics that you talk about when there is a tape distortion like if you're overdriving a cassette tape or a reel-to-reel tape, you tend to get more even-order harmonics so that's what lends to sort of the warmth and clarity of the distortion in this pedal, so definitely the harmonics is sort of a saturation control if you will, if you're talking about like the tape saturation.

So let's check out some of the more clean sort of tones. I feel that this pedal really excels at like jangly sort of sounds just because of how it deals with dissonant chords, usually a lot of even -- these fuzz pedals, which this is supposed to emulate, when you play a dissonant chord like a tritone or something like that -- this is a tritone [DAN PLAYS A DIMINISHED INTERVAL] -- both of the notes speak very well. There is some beating but a lot of times, if you we're to turn up the gain on a normal pedal and you play that, it would sound, you would hear mostly beats and just a lot of noise. With this pedal, the tones really speak through. Let me turn down the output a little bit. [DAN PLAYS A DIMINISHED INTERVAL].

To get really dissonant here, let's throw in some other random notes.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYS DISSONANT CHORDS]

Turn up the gain even more

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYS DISSONANT CHORDS]

So that's about distorted as it would get with the drive disengaged, but we can still sort of discern every tone even though there's that sort of distorted sound glazing or sort of holding the sound together like saturated sound.

All right. Let's turn these down and look at the drive control and then leave it all the way down right now...

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYS GUITAR THROUGH A PEAVEY VALVE KING WITH THE BP-1 ENGAGED, DRIVE CONTROL BYPASSED]

...disengaged, and now engaged.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYS GUITAR THROUGH A PEAVEY VALVE KING WITH THE BP-1 ENGAGED, DRIVE CONTROL ENGAGED]

So it doesn't do anything because we have the drive down. We turn that up.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYS GUITAR THROUGH A PEAVEY VALVE KING WITH THE BP-1 ENGAGED, DRIVE CONTROL ENGAGED, DRIVE KNOB RAISED HIGHER]

So we're starting to hear a bit more fuzz. What I believe is happening here is that the first gain stage in here is getting a little bit more overdriven, so not only are we hearing the sound of the Harmonic Percolator with the harmonics, the saturation sort of sound that we spoke about, we're also getting a little bit of fuzz to it. So I'm actually going to have to turn down the gain on the amp over here a little bit, and let's just listen to how this pedal just all the way up.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYS GUITAR THROUGH A PEAVEY VALVE KING WITH THE BP-1 ENGAGED, DRIVE CONTROL ENGAGED, PARAMETERS CRANKED ALL THE WAY UP]

So actually, what we're getting there is a lot of compression, and I believe that happens when you turn up the drive because it's actually hitting that first gain stage in the pedal so hard that it hits it and compression kicks in and then as the sustain happens, the volume starts to come back up. Let's see how that happens again.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYS GUITAR THROUGH A PEAVEY VALVE KING WITH THE BP-1 ENGAGED, DRIVE CONTROL ENGAGED, PARAMETERS CRANKED ALL THE WAY UP]

So we can see how the sound when it gets its loudest actually gets pushed down and then as it decays it actually pumps up. It's what we call pumping and it sounds like pumping with a slow release compressor. So that's the Barge Concepts BP-1.I hope you see that it's performing quite differently than it did when we shot our thing at Electrical Audio with Steve Albini, so you know it's still a worthwhile pedal in my opinion. Just something in a situation with amps as loud as perhaps they were using at the studio, it may not perform as well and may cause a lot of feedback, so you want to be careful about where you put it in your chain and about how loud you're running your amp.

So thanks for checking us out at Gearwire.Com.