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Will sent us this note through the contact form. I share it here for the general edification of Percolatordom:
“Hello Zeppelin Design Team! I’m Will, the son of Tim Pancake who you’ve been in contact with quite a bit regarding our amp we built. I just wanted to personally thank you for all of your help! I’m quite pleased with the resulting product! I do have a few questions about the design of the amp though. Is the sound of the Percolator amp voiced like a specific already existing amp(Fender Blues Deluxe, Vox AC30, etc) or amp style(Fender, Marshall, Orange, etc)? I’ve done a a/b comparison of the Percolator with my Dad’s Blackface Fender Princeton 112. I tried to match the Fender to the Percolator in terms of volume and EQ. They sounded pretty similar except the Percolator seemed mellower in the treble range of EQ. Which leads me to my next question, what is the EQ of the amp like? Is it flat since there’s no tone control? Is it trebly like a Vox? Mid-Pushed like a Marshall? Mid-scooped like a Fender Blackface? I’ve been playing with the amp a ton over the last week and just can’t seem to put a finger on it. Thank you in advance for your answers! Much appreciated!”
And the response from Brach, designer of the Percolator:
“The Percolator isn’t voiced like anything that I know of. My goal in designing the Percolator was to have a good sounding solo guitar amp at a low wattage. I live in a inner-city single-room high-rise apartment, so my goal was to have an amp that would sound great by itself in my room without making much noise to bother the neighbors. Most amps are designed to sit sonically in a mix so they can be heard in an ensemble setting. They don’t have too much low bass response or high response…they are designed to reproduce audio in a relatively narrow mid-range band…that way they don’t interfere with other instruments that are playing along side it. This way, the guitars can cut through the mix and be heard. This concept of the narrow mid-range frequency band works well when amps are being used in an ensemble context, but it’s fairly limiting when the guitar is a solo instrument. I designed the Percolator to be a solo instrument amp (for playing alone in one’s bedroom) so I widened the bandwidth accordingly. Because of this, it has a much beefier low and low-mid range than most other amps. Conversely, if you try to use the Percolator in an ensemble setting, you’ll find it gets lost in the mix…but this can be rectified with a properly set eq pedal.”
