Fuzz octave pedal full#

There is certainly no shortage of this type of effect - hopefully I’ve managed to pick off most of the smarter ones for your consideration. I discovered so many of these types of pedals that I made the long list of alternatives which sits below. The vast majority of octave effects are sort of clones and replicas of the original Octavia/Octavio/Super-Fuzz circuits - yet there are all manner of newer ones in the mix too. You get a huge variety and degree of octave voicing from subtle, through quirky to fully overblown - which is actually how I like these best. A number of these are just inherent quirks of particular circuits - artefacts as such (not dissimilar to Amp power-supply related ghost notes). There are really lots of different types of octave pedals - whether it is via a certain style of biassing or ring modulation or other filtering / modulation - there are various ways to derive ’octave’ -style fuzz voicings. I actually have 7 from the above listing and a few more besides.

The only pedal I share in common with Josh’s overview is the really elegant Stomp Audio Labs Octopus - which features very simple controls for both Octave Up and Down, and buttons to assign fuzz voicing to each. In my above selection I’ve tried to include the usual mix of favourites and recent releases. Most modern pedals have smart internal circuitry which allows them to double, reverse and condition current and polarity - so stick to those pedals really is my tip.

So unless you are intending for a particular pedal to become a fixed feature of your board, it’s not worth the trouble of having one with very peculiar power requirements. This means that pedals with unusual power requirements are either a hassle to swap in and out, or can be am actual danger to the board - as if you are quickly swapping things around, you might forget that the previous pedal took a higher voltage supply with a positive centre or alternating current, and plugging in the new pedal will very likely result in its damage. I have lots of pedals in the collection and I chop and change things around really quite frequently. still sound fantastic, but you can power them off your typical supply brick, and easily accommodate them on your board.Īs an example - I considered the Fulltone OF-2 Octafuzz for a long time, but decided against it in the end largely on the basis of its odd power requirement - and this is not because I don’t have the supplies and cables to actually run it, but more from a practicality point of ongoing pedal rotation. This is why I always concentrate on more practical and versatile modern pedals - which capture the essence of the original - i.e.

Fuzz octave pedal full#

Many of those earlier fuzzes were really quite binary - either Off, or everything on Full - with few if any workable options in between. and on through the various derivations.Īlthough I am a huge fan of those early innovations, I really don’t like those earlier pedals so much as they typically have all kinds of inconsistencies and idiosyncrasies involving over-sized enclosures, odd power-supply requirements, and lack of proper tone-shaping and volume controls. I really enjoyed JHS Josh Scott’s recent Octave Fuzz YouTube overview (as included below) - where he took the viewer through the history of Octave Fuzz from Roger Mayer and Jimi Hendrix, through the Tycobrahe Octavia, Honey Psychedelic Machine / Shin-ei FY-6 / Univox Super-Fuzz, Ampge Scrambler etc. I’ve found myself increasingly interested in Octave Fuzzes these days, and in fact I have two slightly different ones right now in my pedal-chain - the Anasounds Crankled Bitoun near the front of the chain, and the Beetronics FX Octahive around half-way along - they both have quite different timbres and tonalities, and are furthermore set to sound quite different too, but both create incredibly thick and rich fuzz tones.