Oh jeez, now he's done it

[Mark Hammer]

Due to the recent threads pertaining to octave-up units, I've been tinkering with the various units I have on hand - clones of a Tone Machine, a Green Ringer, a Mayer Octavia, and a Japanese stripped down  Superfuzz type circuit.  I plugged several in series, so I could compare sounds.  But rascal that I am, I couldn't help but run two in series at once.  And it was....glorious.

So I got to thinking, if folks are turning out stacked overdrives, like the King of Tone and so many others, why not stacked two-in-one-box octave-up units?  A Green Ringer clone driving an Octavia clone, for example.  It's not any sort of set and forget tone, I'll grant you, that you leave on throughout a whole song, but they can be tweaked to get lovely sustaining blooming octaves that still have muscle and character, and not just noise.

I'd experimented in past with sticking a Distortion+ clone ahead of a Scrambler, and that got some interesting stuff. But the Scrambler is kind of a chaotic circuit so the result was interesting, but a step out, not a step up.  Using octave circuits intended to yield discernible tones, rather than mayhem, gets a more pleasing result.  Putting the Foxx unit at the start is also great because the octave can be easily defeated so that you have a normal fuzz pushing an octaver if you want.

Folks, start yer engines.  Analog Mike, if you're reading this, you know what comes next.  Oh, and Schottkys, Schottkys, Schottkys.  It'll get you octaves on the doggone 3rd fret.  None of this not-below-the-10th nonsense.

[EBK]

why not stacked two-in-one-box octave-up units?

I would have predicted the intermodulation hell that would arise from a chorus of tortured cats.  Happy to be proven wrong.   

[Mark Hammer]

I wouldn't recommend strumming chords with such a setup, but for single-note runs it's not the hell-hole one might think.  I've heard MUCH worse.

[rnfr]

why not parallel?

[newfish]

Parallel?  You're just adding a single octave up and not a whole lot more - although split between two amps, this could sound massive.

In series, your first octave device is adding an extra octave up - so you now have two notes for your original one.

*Then* send these two notes through another octave up, so you now get your original tone, the original octave up, *another* octave up from the original tone, *and* an octave up from the first device's octave up - so you'll hear 3 tones - 4 if you're lucky!

Much more sonic mayhem.

[EBK]

Reminds me of the time I built a pedal that had a Boss OC-2 in series with a Maestro Brassmaster.  I could use the OC-2 portion to send an octave-down signal into the Brassmaster, which has a wet/dry blended output, giving me the wicked combo of octave-down plus "down-then-up" original octave. 
Unfortunately, the finished project was too massive (1590BBS) and expensive to justify keeping it out of my recycle pile....

[Mark Hammer]

Just posted a grainy video with 6 different octave-up fuzzes, presented alone and in series.

[EBK]

Well, now that I've seen your foot, lower leg, and arm (briefly), and heard your voice, I'm fully prepared to believe you are a real person and not some super-wise AI.    At one point, I was thinking, "He better put them all in series, or I'll complain," but, the calmness with which you asked, "Are you ready to be tortured?" was perfect.

[Mark Hammer]

I didn't really show off the octaving of anything particularly well.  I have to say that in comparison, I thought the Green Ringer clone came off well, as did the ROD-10.  I didn't do anything to the ROD-10, but the Ringer has a boost stage ahead of it (which is why it has two knobs, to adjust the gain of the boost stage), and I set the lowpass filter appropriately, to keep the fizzies out.  The yellow Japanese Superfuzz is actually this circuit, with a variable 5k or 10k resistance in series with the diode pair on the output.  Actually a pretty decent circuit:

The dark turquoise is my D-Scrambler that uses a modified Distortion+ as its input stage.  That front end adds more bass and trims off the top end (150pf in parallel with the usual 1M feedback resistor) to provide a rounded-off input signal.  I reduced the gain of the first transistor stage in the Scrambler, which I thought improved octaving, but much to my surprise a switch from 1N457 to BAT48 diodes diminished audible octave, so I'll revert back to the originals later today.

[daz061]

EBK and hammer time, i never see you on madbean forum, do you not like it?

[EBK]

EBK and hammer time, i never see you on madbean forum, do you not like it?

My last post there was today....  I'm there every day.

[Mark Hammer]

EBK and hammer time, i never see you on madbean forum, do you not like it?

I try to keep my forum participation down to a small number; here and two other places.  That's enough.

[Rob Strand]

Great demo, can't beat doing the experiment.
When you got to 5:  "Is this critical mass?", "Will the screen to go blank and shutdown youtube?"

[Djentronio]

Where'd you get dark green veroboard from?

[Marcos - Munky]

Well, now that I've seen your foot, lower leg, and arm (briefly), and heard your voice, I'm fully prepared to believe you are a real person and not some super-wise AI. 

Actually, those are robot parts driven by a super-wise AI, which generates the voice with something like Stephen Hawking's device but using some kind of technology we still need about 50 years to discover. 


That was a great demo.

[Mark Hammer]

Thanks, Marcos.  I think my favorite part was at the 6:00 mark when I did a two string double-stop.  Normally, when one does that on a single octave-up unit, there are sideband products generated, and you can hear one of them go down in pitch, even though the string is being bent upwards.  It's that particular quality that earned the Green "Ringer" its name: it sort of sounds like a ring modulator.  But with several octave-up units in series, what is intriguing is that the pitch drop is even greater than normal.  What it sounds like is that the artifactual pitch drop from the first unit is being treated by subsequent units as if it was the bent string, generating an even lower pitch drop.

Weird and interesting.

[duck_arse]

Just posted a grainy video with 6 different octave-up fuzzes, presented alone and in series.

nice one mark. I thort it interesting that adding an early in the line pedal [?superfuzz?] actually opened/widened/bassed up the sound, instead of making it ikkyer. and when you went five in a row, the sound reminded me of a  Jacob's Ladder.

I wonder why.

[Mark Hammer]

If I had it to do all over again, I think I'd pay more attention to matching levels, and especially setting them.   I'd probably try a littleharder to illustrate what happens to single notes, since that's generally how we try to use such units. 

One of the interesting things that happens with phase-splitter octave units is that, when pushed hard, they tend to "implode".  The signal just collapses in on itself and gradually recovers over the space of a few seconds; recovery time depending on how hard the push is.  I should probably try and demonstrate that a little better.  I think the "fwap, fwap, fwap" comes from the Snowball microphone hitting a level limit.