BJFE / BearFoot fx Guitar Effects Community

as donner said, the candy apple fuzz does one of the nicest octavia fuzzes i have ever heard!

i am also REALLY fond of the catalinbread ottava magus.....very fun device.....

and my fave true octavia is the one in the foxrox captain coconut.

i LIKe octave fuzz

I like octave fuzz that you can actually hear a true octave coming out and not just a bunch shrill spitty noise over top of everything. With a properly tuned Octavia, you can get it to do true octaves all up and down the neck, even on the low strings. And it can get some really nice almost ring mod effects with chords.... yes, it can actually put out something musical with chords and not just an awful ball of noise (unlike the Foxx Tone Machine... or as I call it, the "F#%king Ball of Noise" pedal).

I think the biggest issue with the Tychobrahe one is the notorious "backwards" transistor in the first stage... if the Chicago Iron one is an exact clone, the first transistor will be backwards and this is responsible for (I'd estimate) about 70% of the sputtery misbiased sound it makes.

I wrote a big long rant about this over at Freestomp in the Workbench section. I spent a weekend playing with the Octavia and several other octave circuits on proto board and that's where many of my discoveries and opinions have come from. Before that, I'd only ever used a Tone Machine clone, which I thought was useless for octaves. I had almost totally given up on being satisfied with octave fuzzes until I finally got the Octavia to behave how I wanted and now it's one of my favorite effects.

soulsonic wrote:I like octave fuzz that you can actually hear a true octave coming out and not just a bunch shrill spitty noise over top of everything. With a properly tuned Octavia, you can get it to do true octaves all up and down the neck, even on the low strings. And it can get some really nice almost ring mod effects with chords.... yes, it can actually put out something musical with chords and not just an awful ball of noise (unlike the Foxx Tone Machine... or as I call it, the "F#%king Ball of Noise" pedal).

I think the biggest issue with the Tychobrahe one is the notorious "backwards" transistor in the first stage... if the Chicago Iron one is an exact clone, the first transistor will be backwards and this is responsible for (I'd estimate) about 70% of the sputtery misbiased sound it makes.

I wrote a big long rant about this over at Freestomp in the Workbench section. I spent a weekend playing with the Octavia and several other octave circuits on proto board and that's where many of my discoveries and opinions have come from. Before that, I'd only ever used a Tone Machine clone, which I thought was useless for octaves. I had almost totally given up on being satisfied with octave fuzzes until I finally got the Octavia to behave how I wanted and now it's one of my favorite effects.

Hmmm yeah sounds like something begging to be reworked - could you put a switch on the first trannie spot and make it selectable between sputter or butter type octave or something ??

..... had some playing time today and had a great deal of fun running the Octron into the Dyna Red into the Honey Bee !!!!!

and the CAF with the fuzz rolled down at the octave spot too !!!! just puts a rippin top octave on an already great tone...

I tried running some different distortions in front of the HB today, but it always seemed to make things sound smaller and clamped. I liked the sound much better with the HB before the distortion... that it made it sound bigger and I could control how much edge it put on the top with the Nature control.
I know that has nothing to do with octavias... I haven't tried it with fuzz yet.

Yeah its different with distortion as you noted --- usually the last pedal has the most overall effect ....using the B in front as you said lets you add the dynamic distortion qualities of the HB to whatever its run into ....

and also experiment with different levels on the drives - it can become saturated and over complressed real easy - often less is literally more