What is your favorite octave pedal to build?
Link to project layout?
Which way octaves? How many? Clean or Fuzz?
Octave up fuzz?
What the Fuzz?! Combination of T.E.'s Push me Pull you, with an LM386 thrown in for good measure. Absolute fuzz octave nasty goodness. Built it 5, maybe 6 years ago (might be longer), and it's still on my pedalboard.
(http://i257.photobucket.com/albums/hh218/reverse_engineer/wtf_v6_layout.png) (http://s257.photobucket.com/user/reverse_engineer/media/wtf_v6_layout.png.html)
My vero (part numbers follow the above layout);
(http://i214.photobucket.com/albums/cc196/digi2t/WTF_v6.png) (http://s214.photobucket.com/user/digi2t/media/WTF_v6.png.html)
I don't know if I'd call any octave pedal "amazing", but I've built a number of octave-up fuzzes and find the Foxx Tone Machine to be a satisfying build, with a reliably strong octave.
Unless it's a digital circuit,you can expect that audible octaving will be hard to get below the 7th fret or so. It's the string properties, not the circuit.
Quote from: Mark Hammer on June 18, 2016, 02:19:26 PM
I don't know if I'd call any octave pedal "amazing", but I've built a number of octave-up fuzzes and find the Foxx Tone Machine to be a satisfying build, with a reliably strong octave.
Unless it's a digital circuit,you can expect that audible octaving will be hard to get below the 7th fret or so. It's the string properties, not the circuit.
I've never built a FTM, but have played a few (reissue Tone Machine, original Fuzz-Wha Machine - which is the FTM + wah) - and though I might not call them "amazing"
octavers I would absolutely call them amazing
pedals. In fact, that's pretty much why I haven't tried my hand at one: they're pretty much perfect as is.
"Perfect? But the octave isn't foot-switchable! Here, try this boutique clo-" SHUT UP IS YOUR BOUTIQUE CLONE COVERED WITH PURPLE FUZZ? I THINK NOT. ;) So yeah, I'm a Tone Machine advocate for sure.
As far as amazing octavers go - there's always a tradeoff. It tracks poorly, or it distorts too much for your purposes, or you have something against digital. If digital's OK with you, the POG/HOG family is pretty decent. Is the suboctave on the Micro-Synth the same (basically) circuit as the Octave Multiplexer? If so, EHX does pretty well with octave down. So does BOSS, TBH.
An octave-up is gonna distort. In large part, your favorite upper-octave circuit is going to be the one whose fuzz you prefer. Scrambler, Blender, Tone Machine, Octavia - all got their own thing going on.
EQD's Bit Commander is a pretty nutz synth-style
up and
down octave... and DOD made a couple of boxes in the '90s. One was a ring mod + distortion, called the "Gonkulator;" and the other was a 1 + 2 octaves down monster, the Meathook or something lol... DOD had the employees' children naming their pedals, I'm sure of it. Anyway, they were actually really good - not traditional in any sense, very "out of the box."
look for Pink Jimi Photons video of the octave up sick box (OUSB).
Check the EH microsynth