Tycobrahe Octavia Build

[bwanasonic]

Just finished a Tycobrahe Octavia and am quite pleased with it. Had a few stumbling blocks getting going, but after tracing a few boneheaded errors it works nicely. It does have a bit of high pitched oscillation at the very max setting of the intensity control. If I roll back the treble on the guitar I can tame it, but it is not much of an issue, as I much prefer this pedal with the intensity rolled completely back. This gives the most pronounced octave effect. With the neck pickup on my Strat, I get a nice range of Jimi-esque tones. Running either a Ge Fuzz Face or Mosfet boost after it to *kick it up a notch*. I used one 5087 and two 5089s. I may try a PNP Ge for Q1 at some point. Another poster had mentioned using a trimpot for R5 (collector of Q1 to ground), but I didn't find this to have much effect. I used the medium sized pad-per-hole (15X25 pads) from smallbear and was able to (just barely) stuff it into the 125B sized enclosure I prefer. Overall a pretty versatile pedal. At full intensity a pretty extreme fuzz and at the other end the classic octave sounds I was looking for. I will post my layout and some photos ( maybe a clip or two) in the next couple of weeks*. After the holiday craziness is over...

Kerry M

* http://home.earthlink.net/~bwanacentral/html/bwanasonic_main.html