202a Percolator

In stock and shipping now (unless it says "sold out" and i forget to come here and edit this page again - but right now there's some in stock and ready to ship so.. o-okay you get it ok ok good good)

At last, the 202 enters what I hope will be a period of increased production volume with the 202a! Alec Breslow from Mask Audio Electronics helped me by designing a PCB layout that drastically reduces my production time so I can, ostensibly, build way more way faster. We'll see!

The 202 is my take on the inimitable Interfax Harmonic Percolator, an unruly tone machine renowned for its suppression of odd-order harmonics, slight octaving effects, and chewy, gnarled distortion sounds. There are about as many variations on this circuit as there are people willing to build them, and this is just my take. This is how I have my personal whip tuned, and as you'd expect I've done a lot of breadboarding and fiddling and real-world trials and errors at years of shows to arrive here.

The crucial components here are the vintage Si & Ge transistors, and a pair of these *specific* germanium diodes (which were kind of hard to find, I might add). You don't want to know how many different diodes I tried - these are the ones. Each set of NOS components is measured for gain and then audited by ear to make sure they do The Thing.

Each of these machines have the potential to interact drastically differently with guitar, pickup selection, pedal stack, and amp. At once you’ll notice a fierce, unforgiving upper midrange bite, with a lower octave undertone supporting your notes as you move up the fretboard, almost like an Octavia tone but inverted. Dialing back the knobs transitions unruly, mangled chaos into a surprisingly usable overdrive tone. Many tend to like this in front of a slightly overdriven amp, or stacked in front of another gain pedal as a tone shaper. Use it like a Fuzz Face and roll your guitar’s volume back for slinky, jangly overdrive with the roar a mere touch away. There are many sweet spots here, and I’m going to let you quit reading and discover them all for yourself.

** A note about the internal trim pot: adjusting this variable resistor will change what frequencies where the octave thing happens. Sometimes that effect is pretty subtle, depends a bit on your setup. But if you want to mess with this, it's fine you won't hurt anything! There are two test points on the pcb above the trim pot where you can measure the resistance if you want, and reverse whatever changes you made if you need to. I usually set it either at 1.5MΩ or .9MΩ depending on my mood. "Stock", if you can even believe there is such a thing, is 750kΩ. The full range is 680kΩ to 2.2MΩ. If I recall correctly, more resistance corresponds to a higher frequency center.
It's such a subtle effect I elected not to include a dedicated knob for it, also to keep you from twiddling knobs forever and ever searching for t0n3z instead of just diming the knobs and playing the guitar.

This pedal uses a standard negative-ground power supply scheme, current draw is pretty low, and it is highly recommended that you use high quality isolated power. Lifetime warranty applies.

VERY SPECIAL THANKS to Alec Breslow at Mask Audio Electronics for the pcb design and layout, and Scott Evans of Antisleep Audio for the graphic design help since I still cannot be bothered to learn how.