Early digital octave and pitch-shifting effects had their own problems, including stability and latency issues, but as the technology grew and matured many of these problems were sorted out.
And of course, getting musical results from chords or arpeggios is not possible.Īll of this changed when digital processing came on the scene. If you aren't careful, things turn into a garbled mess very quickly, thus limiting the usefulness of these effects to only a very narrow set of musical circumstances.
The tracking is sluggish and unstable, and sometimes unusable, depending on where on the neck one plays and what pickup is being used. However, while often sounding awesome in the right context, the monophonic analog octave effects of days gone by are also notoriously glitchy and temperamental. Everyone loves a good octave, whether to add some meat and complexity to a solo, or to make a big riff sound even bigger. Pedals listed alphabetically following on from the sort of originals.Of all the wonderful developments in guitar gear brought forth by the rapid advance of digital technology, the proliferation of polyphonic octave effects is one of the most exciting. So should be plenty of options here for everyone - in terms of size, sound and feature-set. The odd pedal out in this listing is the Evil Filter which combines a number of different effects under the same chassis, while my other favourite here is the really new Pigtronix Octava - another cool mini pedal - with 5 tone controls and the ability to turn down the fuzz. In the meantime I came across the rather cool mini Malekko Omicron Fuzz - a regular powered Germanium diode fuzz with 3-way internal voicing switch - and which just happens to cover octave tones - so I settled on that. However back then my power supplies weren’t all fully isolated, and the Octafuzz most definitely requires isolated supply with reversed polarity or centre positive lead - so that kind of put the plan on hold. All the Up ones are pretty much derivations of the original classics, while the Okto Nøjs and Blue Box are more more modern evolutions pitching in the other direction.įor a while I thought I really needed an Octave Fuzz pedal - and my favourite candidate at the time was the Fulltone Octafuzz. I’ve marked up the below listed pedals in parenthesis as to whether they are octave up or down - in fact 9 of the 12 are ’Up’, 2 are ’Down’ and the odd one out kind of glitches in ’Both’ directions. All these pedals used Silicon transistors initially, but it’s not clear what they use now, some may well have switched to more controllable OpAmp chips. Jimi variously called his pedal the ’Octavio’ as well as ’Octavia’ so now we have Roger Mayer making updated versions of his original Ocatvia, the Tycobrahe Octavia being remade by Fulltone as the Octafuzz, and Jim Dunlop buying up the Hendrix licencing rights and putting out its own version - the Octavio. This sound is best known via the classic Hendrix tracks Purple Haze and Fire which went on to inspire a whole category of pedals - including the other legendary octave pedal - the Tycobrahe Octavia. You cannot talk about Octave Fuzz Pedals without mentioning Jimi Hendrix and his sound technician Roger Mayer - who together collaborated to create the very first octave pedal - the Octavia - which reproduced the input signal from a guitar one octave higher in pitch, and mixed it with the original and added fuzz.
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