STEVE ALBINI: I first got an Interfax HP-1 from Jay Tiller, who was at a time was working at a pawnshop in -- He’s now a sheriff, but he was at that time working at a pawnshop in Milwaukee, and he said, “Yeah, there’s this crazy guy here at Milwaukee that used to make sound gear. He has this fuzz pedal called the Harmonic Percolator. You should try it out.” So, I got one from him. There was one sitting, one just at the pawnshop, and I got it from him, and I tried it out, and it was super crazy distortion.

I later learned that what makes it sound so crazy is that it is a single-ended amplifier that’s clipping, so you get only even-order harmonics. So, even at its most extreme where it’s doing the most crazy stuff to the signal, you’re not getting quite as much extraneous noise signal like a lot of distortions are symmetrical, so that the more clips they get, the more squared waves gets on both ends.

On a single-ended amplifier that’s clipping, you get a normal-looking wave on one excursion, and then a clipped off wave on the other excursion. So, that’s that.

I don't know if there’s a way that you could make it so that it accentuates just odd harmonics, but it’s even and odd but it -- Yeah. Let me think. Even and odd? No, just even-order ones.

ROB WARMOWSKI: Because even ones are the nice ones.

STEVE ALBINI: Well, that’s all subjective, but yeah. Like there are certain situations where you want it to sound hideous, and there are certain situations where you just want the distortion pedal to be doing most of the work for you, and that’s when I like it. When I use the Harmonic Percolator, it’s because I’m too lazy to play the guitar for the next couple of seconds. [LAUGHING]

So, when I first got the Harmonic Percolator, some friends of mine were in a band called Pussy Galore, and they had three guitar players in that band. And for Christmas one year, I wanted to get them Harmonic Percolators, right? By then, Harmonic Percolators had become hard to find. The original Harmonic Percolators in Milwaukee were no longer available. My Milwaukee scout, Jay Tiller couldn’t track any more down for me. So, I asked an electronic friend of mine, Mr. Bill, who works at out of the fabulous guitar shop, Guitar Works, at Evanston, I asked him if he could duplicate the Harmonic Percolator. And it’s a very simple circuit.

The critical components, that is the transistors and the capacitors that are used to form the distortion circuit are all obscured. The original Interfax company, crazy guy, had glued, had epoxied metal covers over the components so that you couldn’t look at the circuit board and discern the values or the part numbers for any of the components. So, Mr. Bill just did some measurements and was able to simulate the circuit without being able to exactly mimic the design, like he could make the same circuit using similar components, not necessarily identical, and he made me a set of these pedals which he called the Pussy Fuzz in honor of Pussy Galore, and I gave three of them to Pussy Galore, and I kept one for myself. So, this is Mr. Bill’s mimic of the Harmonic Percolator.

[STEVE ALBINI PLAYING GUITAR THROUGH THE PUSSY FUZZ]

And it’s pretty good. The distortion character is very similar. It doesn’t have quite the amount of low frequency that the original Harmonic Percolator does. It’s not quite as haywire in terms of the distortion, but is lacking the horrible. So, if you’re interested in having Mr. Bill make one of these for you, you could call the Guitar Works, and he might still have the schematic kicking around. The Guitar Works number is (847) 475-0855. [LAUGHING] How’s that huh? I never lost it. Still up there, rattling around like dried beans. [LAUGHING]