Steve Albini

Steve Albini was the guitarist of Big Black and Shellac and one of the most in-demand recording engineers of his era, working with Nirvana, Pixies and PJ Harvey among others¹. He passed away on 9 May 2024, the day a JHS Pedals episode was released that became a tribute to his work². Bassist Charlie Jones, who recorded with him, remembered him plainly:

As a player, Albini's sound rested on very few units. Two of them, a 1970s fuzz and a 1970s preamp, have since taken on a life of their own among pedal builders, and Aion FX names the Harmonic Percolator as one of his "secret sauce" effect units⁴.

The clangy guitar tone

The core of Albini's guitar sound is usually traced to two pieces of gear, both originally studio tools rather than guitar-shop staples.

The Intersound IVP preamp. The Intersound Instrument Voicing Preamp is a solid-state preamp from the 1970s, and Aion FX calls Albini "perhaps the most well-known advocate of the IVP, using it as part of his own live rig as well as in the studio"⁵. Delicious Audio goes further, describing the IVP as "responsible for a large part of Albini's signature clangy guitar tone," and notes that the same preamp channel can be found as a standalone unit in the company's Surveyor⁶. For a player chasing that sound today, the IVP channel is the piece to look at, and it belongs to the broader family of preamp pedals.

The Interfax Harmonic Percolator HP-1. The HP-1 is a late-1970s distortion box designed by Ed Giese, famously huge, with just two slider controls: one for Harmonics, or input gain, and one for Balance, representing volume or output⁷. JHS Pedals, quoting Land Devices, calls it "famed producer Steve Albini's favorite distortion box"⁸, and gearnews.com notes the pedal "is often associated with the late producer/musician Steve Albini and has a bit of a cult status"⁹. Delicious Audio describes how he used it: "Albini would use the HP-1 on noisy, clangy guitar passages when he needed some intense feedback"¹⁰. Guitar Pedal X credits him with popularising the fuzz format the HP-1 represents⁷.

The HP-1's influence outlived the original. UK builder Latent Lemon Audio built its Hurts fuzz around it: the builder says, "I wanted a Harmonic Percolator that sounded something like Steve Albini's, but couldn't find the sub-octave throaty HP-1 sound I was looking for, especially after I luckily got to record an old 70s original Ed Giese built Interfax HP-1 which sounded amazing!"¹¹. The Hurts V2 shoots for the sound of Albini's personal HP-1 while adding several tweaking options¹⁰. Pedal of the Day, reviewing a Harmonic Percolator build, notes that behind "Steve Albini of Big Black and Shellac, these rather bland-looking boxes have a wide range of tones to investigate"¹².

The ZVEX Super Hard On

ZVEX Effects says on its artist page that "Steve frequently used a ZVEX Super Hard On when recording albums"¹¹. The Super Hard On is a boost pedal, and in Albini's case it sat in front of the amp rather than replacing it, consistent with his stated view of what pedals are for. ZVEX also makes a range of other effects, including the Tremolo Probe, Lo-Fi Junky Vexter Series, Fuzz Probe Vexter, Machine and Fuzzolo¹³.

What he thought of guitar pedals

Albini was not a pedalboard builder, and he said so. In a March 2024 MusicRadar interview he observed that on his first trip to Japan in the late 1980s, "most guitarists that I worked with had a pedalboard with half a dozen pedals on it, and that's how they would craft their sound"¹⁴. Asked about amp modeling, he called it a "trend" to a certain extent, though not one he was against¹⁴. His reservation was about pedals becoming the sound itself:

He summed up his own position on the trend with "It's a trend. I don't really have an opinion about it"¹⁴.

He did, however, keep a collection of pedals at his Electrical Audio studio, the ones he had gathered over the years and deemed "significantly less than stellar," as he revealed in a 2024 MusicRadar piece revisiting his tour of his worst effects pedals¹². He also played guitar outside his own bands, doing a tour with the Japanese noise-rock band Zani Geva as an additional guitar player¹².

His legacy in pedals

Albini's tone has an afterlife in modern pedal design. Beyond the Latent Lemon Hurts¹⁰, Electronic Audio Experiments' Dude Incredible V2 is a dual gain pedal inspired by his work as an indie rock producer⁶. His engineering work also reached the pedal world directly: he was the recording engineer for Sunn O))) and Earthquaker Devices' Life Metal album, whose companion Life Pedal was described by gearnews.com as "the ideal ally" for the album's dark, heavy tones¹⁵¹⁶. Screaming Females recorded their album Ugly with him¹⁷.

On the day his death was announced, JHS Pedals released an episode that became an unplanned tribute:

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For a player, the takeaway from Albini's rig is its smallness: one distortion box, one preamp, one boost, and an amplifier doing the rest of the work.

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