I’m not sure we need yet another Percolator out there, we have plenty of options already. While the price here is undoubtedly highly attractive - which cannot be said of its artwork! Not only does it have faux printed-on Dymo style labels, but they’re designed to look all out of alignment - to indicate that those labels were applied by a low-skilled employee. This is overall a familiar trope, but the higgledy-piggledy nature of that arrangement really sets off my OCD!

I have several great ...

August turned out a little bit different than expected. Not so many releases - as expected - but really busy regardless - with a number of Marquee Events and Articles throughout the month. With the king of the crop being the Extended Capacitor Primer - to which I’ve just added a further section on Capacitor Lifespan. Obviously I hit 15,000 followers on Instagram - which is a significant achievement - a really killer month all-round with some big articles - meaning I’m a little bit burned out ...

For this particular article it probably makes sense to first check out my second visual below - which explains most of the technicalities of this pedals - which has a very unusual control topology to match its rarified construction.

You can see from the Transistors references that the first two are for the Percolator circuit - Q1 & Q2, we then have the Q3 Buffer that boosts into the Factory Fuzz circuit to overcome the typical impedance issues for said 2nd Fuzz circuit. And then the Factory...

The original 70’s Interfax Harmonic Percolator HP-1 came with Germanium Transistors, and indeed Fredric makes versions of those too - including its own compact Harmonic Percolator and larger extended format Utility Percolator. All 3 are available on the Fredric Effects Webstore. Both the compact percolators are £140 and equivalent - with the Utility Percolator a wee bit more at  £175.

As befits its silicon components - the Silicon Harmonic Percolator is a little more aggressive and muscular...

So this article was inspired by the fairly recent Leeds Pedal Show attendance - where indeed I picked up a number of these. Namely - the Emmergy FX Slowdriver, Fredric Effect Demon Fuzz V2, Funny Little Booxes Caught By The Fuzz, and SoundLad Liverpool’s Hungry Beaver. I had also intended to pick up the Pyroglyphs and Flow Decoder from Tom @ Glowfly Pedals - while alas he had to cancel last minute as he had become quite ill.

The Buzzing Bugs BB02 and Demiurge Intsturments Chroma Drive I’ve ...

My good friend Dan @ Buzzing Bugs Audio has a super sale on for the whole of this month - in order to gather funds for some exciting new projects in early 2025.

I was instrumental in getting Dan to switch to higher quality Milled Aluminium knobs - which fully reflect the quality of his well thought out circuits. 

I have all 4 of these - all are excellent, while I particularly favour the BB01 Fuzzy Voxy Preamp, and the BB03 Lo-Fi Chorus / Vibrato / Warble - with Reverb - both of those ...

In the wake of the release of the Seattle Driver - which replaces and reboots 2 of my favourite but discontinued  Drunk Beaver Pedals, along with the fact that Drunk Beaver is now my second most populous brand - it seems only fitting that I should pick out some of my favourites from that range across the 4 years of my involvement.

I first spotted Drunk Beaver Pedals when doing research on the Boss DS-1 back in October / November of 2020. Drunk Beaver had its V1 extended take on the Boss DS-...

John Snyder once more extracts the I.V.P. side from the Dude Incredible (V2.5) - as the stand-alone Surveyor Preamp / Overdrive. Obviously the I.V.P. is based on the celebrated Intersound Rackmount Instrument Voicing Preamplifier - known for its somewhat ’clangy’ tone and harsh attack at higher treble settings. It’s a pretty distinct sounding overdrive / preamp with versatile applications across a number of different instruments.

"The Surveyor features a unique, transformer-loaded “Tube ...

I last did a roundup selection for Harmonic Percolators back in May 2019 (around 5 years ago!), where this time around I near enough double down on the possible options. Of course the late 70’s Ed Giese designed pedal was absolutely ginormous, and famously with just 2 slider controls - one for ’Harmonics’ or input gain, where the second ’Balance’ one represented Volume / Output. Interestingly this was a hybrid Fuzz circuit - which originally featured 2N404 Germanium, and 2N3565 Silicon ...