Columbus, Ohio’s Malaise Forever is a one-person pedal builder that hopefully chose its name before the 2020 pandemic, and that specializes in hand-made dirt boxes. The Clubber Lang V1 was their take on the Harmonic Percolator, although the circuit’s V2 was reworked in collaboration with Mask Audio Electronics, and adds a MOSFET input stage to push the pedal to the next level in the wild texture department.
The original Percolator featured a very particular circuit with a mix of now rare Germanium and Silicon transistors. The Clubber Lang is not a faithful recreation of it, featuring several changes, as highlighted by the builder:
It features a MOSFET input stage to push some wild texture out of the circuit, as well as asymmetrical Germanium soft clipping, increased low end output, and a widely effective tone control.
The botton knob (“burn“) controls the MOSFET stage, the other three are Output (“loud“), the fuzz stage (“harm“) and the tone control – which is very interactive with the two gains.
An internal trimmer (called “whud“) provide extra sonic flavor:
[It] controls feedback resistance. Basically, this controls the level of stability of the output from the silicon transistor, which affects a few aspects of the sound of the pedal. Lowering this will make the pedal sound absolutely wild and further increase the level of interactivity between controls, but it could take you below unity volume. Turning it up will strengthen the integrity of the output signal and increase the output volume slightly, but remove some of the interactivity between the gain stages, tone control, and soft clipping diodes. Midpoint is the stock setting.
Here are the first videos of V2 of the Malaise Forever Clubber Lang.
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Malaise Forever Clubber Lang Fuzz V1
CLUBBER LANG is my love letter to the Interfax Harmonic Percolator, with some changes. It features a MOSFET input stage to push some wild texture out of the circuit, as well as asymmetrical Germanium soft clipping, increased low end output, and a widely effective tone control. There’s a lot of interactivity between the two gain and tone controls, making this a wild and fun fuzz. CLUBBER LANG loves it when you switch your pick ups and play with your instrument’s tone control. CLUBBER LANG loves input dynamics and it loves to stack with other dirt pedals. Other notable features:
– 2.1mm 9v DC power jack (center negative)
– Lumberg audio jacks
– Pro soft-click true bypass switchingCONTROLS:
Burn: MOSFET stage gain control (crackles when turned)
Harm: Fuzz stage gain control
Tone: Counter-clockwise for more low end, clockwise for more treble
Level: Controls output volume
Whud: Internal trimmer; controls feedback resistance. Basically, this controls the level of stability of the output from the silicon transistor, which affects a few aspects of the sound of the pedal. Lowering this will make the pedal sound absolutely wild and further increase the level of interactivity between controls, but it could take you below unity volume. Turning it up will strengthen the integrity of the output signal and increase the output volume slightly, but remove some of the interactivity between the gain stages, tone control, and soft clipping diodes. Midpoint is the stock setting.
