A well-ordered and intuitive means to octave fuzz disorder, in many shapes and colors.
Great basic, focused fuzz tone. Intuitive if you’re open-minded. Lots of surprises. Nice design. High-quality construction.
None
$225
Death By Audio Octave Clang
deathbyaudio.com
Every instrument is a tool for expressing feeling. But when you have to convey a certain range of emotions spanning anguish, the rush of sonic anarchy, and the exhilaration of total liberation, octave fuzzes are tops. Generally speaking, octave fuzz isn’t an effect you use casually.
And it often leads to hairy places where you are forced to surrender control. But if you have something to say with an electric guitar and you want to punctuate it with an exclamation point, adding octave fuzz can do the trick. Need further convincing? Kick back, close your eyes, listen to Jimi’s “Machine Gun,” and get back to me.
It’s little surprise that Death By Audio, with its well-documented love of extreme and perverse sounds, would dabble in octave distortion. What’s a wonder is that DBA ever discontinued its own excellent take on the effect, the Octave Clang. There’s no need to mourn any longer, though. The Octave Clang is back. And it’s as thrillingly chaotic and—yes—as practical as ever.
Space Station Salvage
I try to avoid saying much about how pedals look. Unless you’re collecting them to display on your mantle, it’s sound that counts. Admittedly, DBA has my number when it comes to their graphics and control layouts—appearing, as they do, like a cross of ’70s-synth and conceptual automotive and aerospace design from the same period. That may not mean much to you, but I feel extra compelled to unleash when I see the Clang staring back at me from the floor. It looks awesome.
“It has mass and spiky character, and does a great job of suggesting the brutish, switchblade attitude of ’60s fuzz circuits while staying in its lane in a mix.”
The control set is simple. One footswitch bypasses the pedal or brings in the gain section without the octave-up effect. The second footswitch adds the octave. You cannot operate the octave effect alone. The two leftmost knobs are for output level and gain (which DBA claims can be as much as an extra 39 dB). The third is the shape control, which controls a pre-gain tilt EQ that enables a lot of control in a relatively forgiving way—no small consideration when you’re messing with an effect that can sound so hot and hectic.
Fizz, Spittle, and Valkyrie’s Screams
The fuzz side of the circuit is idiosyncratic and thrilling, if you like variations on snarling first- and second-generation ’60s fuzzes. It’s not an easy fuzz to characterize. It doesn’t have the porcine megatonnage of DBA’s Fuzz War. And because it has to dovetail with the octave side of the circuit, it doesn’t billow with the overtone content and sustain you would hear even in simple ’60s fuzzes like the Fuzz Face, Bosstone, Tone Bender, or Fuzzrite. Nevertheless, it has mass and spiky character and does a great job of suggesting the brutish, switchblade attitude of those ’60s circuits while staying in its lane in a mix. Studio rats may treasure it for that reason. And because fundamental notes sound so strong and relatively uncluttered, it’s also really cool for trashy but succinct sub-Stooges power chording. I’d be psyched to have this fuzz circuit alone.
Adding the octave expands the Octave Clang’s tonal palette, of course. It’s easy to set up ferocious octave fuzz sounds that work for sawing power chords and Hendrix fare. But it also shifts the tactile responsiveness of the pedal and your guitar—often demanding a rethink of your picking approach and the fretboard—that can spawn creative results. When you set the EQ, gain, and output settings on the counterclockwise side of noon and use the octave and fuzz together, picking at points close to the bridge generates almost ring-modulated and metallic Martian gamelan sounds not unlike first-gen octave fuzzes like the Ampeg Scrambler and Green Ringer. But the Octave Clang’s pre-gain tilt EQ control and the many cool ways it interacts with the gain knob and your guitar’s dials make the Clang capable of many weirder, more mysterious shades of these already odd and arresting sounds. Switching guitars can create radically different tones, too. The concise sustain I can get from a semi-hollow Rickenbacker, for instance, activates the pedal and the resulting overtones in a very different way than a Stratocaster or SG, whose different overtone profiles excite different aspects of the pedal’s response envelope.
The Verdict
If you have an appetite for new distortion and fuzz sounds that can totally transform a hook or mood, the very simple-looking Octave Clang offers a trove of possibilities. Though I have gleefully described many of the device’s deviant capacities, neither these accounts nor Death By Audio’s reputation as noise merchants should dissuade you from approaching the Octave Clang as a very practical and unique option for fuzz and distortion tones. Psych-punk chording can take on new, more feral energy. And otherwise boneheaded hooks can become ear candy. Experimentally minded musicians, producers, and engineers with a willingness to dig a bit will find many such surprises in the well-designed, well-built, and well-executed Octave Clang.
This blendable passive system might be your single-coil solution.
Hello and welcome back to Mod Garage. This year, the Fender Stratocaster is celebrating its 70th birthday. Happy birthday, and all the best for your next 70 years! To celebrate, I chose a Strat as our guinea pig for this month. But everything we are talking about applies to all single-coil-equipped guitars.
Let’s have a deep look into what can be done to get rid of single-coil hum, which can be very annoying, especially when playing live. I’m sure you all know the situation: Your band managed to get an important Friday night gig at, let’s say, Bob’s Country Bunker. You and your bandmates arrive in time to set up your equipment, naturally with everything plugged into the same circuit as Bob’s popcorn machine, dishwasher, and sandwich maker. You plug in your Strat, turn up your amp, and there’s a loud humming noise coming out of it.
A single-coil pickup has one coil with six magnet rods and two bobbins holding everything together. It not only picks up the strings, but also all kinds of external magnetic fields generated by transformers and other electromagnetic devices. But when two coils are wound in opposite directions and are working together, the hum will get canceled. This is an old principle dating back to the beginning of the 20th century, and it’s how a humbucker pickup works. In the past, guitarists had to struggle with radio stations, fluorescent tubes, transformers, and the like; today, it’s more digital fallout and, of course, digital power supplies of all kinds.
The pickup industry created all kinds of hum-canceling pickups in single-coil shape, most commonly stacked and double-rail-style pickups. So, a humbucker pickup can be the ticket out of such unpleasant live situations. But all of these options generate a different magnetic field compared to a single-coil pickup, resulting in a different tone. The resonant frequency is shifted downwards a little bit because the ohmic resistance and inductance of the two coils are added together. The tone gets milder and warmer, with more midrange—you all know this tone. Splitting such a humbucker will sound more single-coil-like, but it will pick up hum again. Connecting both coils in parallel rather than in series will also sound more single-coil-like and is hum-canceling, but it’s not a real single-coil tone.
Using a reverse wound, reverse polarity (RWRP) pickup such as a Strat’s middle pickup will get you at least two hum-free switching positions (bridge+middle and neck+middle), but even this sounds different. Going active is another way to fight humming noises, and these special pickups sound more or less like a real single-coil, too.
But what if you don’t want to compromise? Is pure single-coil tone with no hum possible? Yes and no! It is possible to come close, but one day, a digital gremlin may find a way to annoy you to a certain degree. And there are extreme situations where only a humbucker will work.
One step in the right direction is shielding the pickups and cavity of your guitar. Shielding the compartment of a guitar the right way is a challenge on its own, and I will cover this in a future installment of this column. But even if all the shielding is done the right way, the sound of the pickup will be altered to a certain degree, which is the nature of the beast. And the shielding is always there, so you can’t switch between pure single-coil and shielded single-coil tone.
So, what about switchable hum-canceling for your guitar? This way you could have both: pure single-coil tone and hum-free operation when needed. And if this could not only be made switchable but also controllable, you could balance your tone between the two.
Here is a solution based on principles from Bill Lawrence, which my dear friend Bernd C. Meiser from the BSM company has refined in order to make it more controllable: a variable dummy coil.
“But what if you don’t want to compromise? Is pure single-coil tone with no hum possible? Yes and no!”
In simple terms, a dummy coil is an additional pickup that is identical to the other pickups but without magnets. It has a phase, but no polarity. A dummy coil accepts the electric signal created by the magnetic single-coil pickup and reverses it, which will remove a large portion of the hum. In the process, a very small amount of the treble signal is lost as well. However, this treble loss is far less compared to stacked or dual-rail humbuckers.
The specs of the dummy coil need to be close to the pickup you are complementing. So, any universal dummy coils advertised to work with all single-coil pickups will only work to a certain degree but not perfectly. Instead, it’s best if you order a dummy coil that matches your pickup. The company who made your pickup will know the formula, and a dummy coil from them will be super effective. If that pickup is from a larger manufacturer, you’ll need to find out specific parameters—wire gauge, wire type, number of turns—so a custom pickup company can make a matching dummy coil for you.
The simplest way to set up a dummy coil would be to connect it permanently, so it’s 100 percent active all the time. For more flexibility, you can add a switch to turn the dummy coil on and off. But the most flexible way is to use a pot to control the dummy coil, so you can dial in pure single-coil tone, 100 percent dummy-coil hum-removing, and everything in between—in other words, so you can balance tone and hum-free-ness depending on the certain playing situation.
To do so, connect a 0.01 uF capacitor in parallel to the dummy coil. The high-end frequencies will no longer pass the dummy coil and its inductance; they will be drained low-resistance to ground. For the bass frequencies, the capacitor is still high-resistance so the dummy coil is active. This way you will have humbucking functionality for the bass frequencies, but pure single-coil tone in the high frequencies—what a perfect and clever solution from Bill Lawrence. If you now connect the capacitor and the dummy coil to a pot, you have a controllable dummy coil as described above.
You can experiment with the capacitor value for fine-tuning your system; 0.01 μF is a pretty good value to start. With a smaller cap, you shift the humbucking effect toward the high frequencies and vice versa. A smaller cap means more overall humbucking (bass and highs) and a larger cap means less overall humbucking, with the high and middle frequencies staying untouched.
A Stratocaster is perfect for this mod because it has two tone controls. One will be converted to a Telecaster-style master tone control, while the other will become the new dummy-coil controller.
For a Stratocaster with three vintage flavored single-coil pickups, I recommend the following pot configuration (all audio taper): 250k volume, 500k tone, 500k dummy-coil controller. This way, in humbucking mode, the two coils are connected in series rather than in parallel, so the resonance peak will be dampened. The two 500k pots will help compensate for this. The 250k volume is always the way to go in a passive guitar system to ensure the best and most even control. The 500k tone pot can be a little bit over the top in pure single-coil mode, but simply roll it down a little and you are in the 250k ballpark—problem solved!
Here we go for the wiring. It’s not hard to do and mostly uses the parts that are already there:
Illustration courtesy Singlecoil
That’s it! Next month, we will talk about some alternative ways to service a Stratocaster that can be real time savers, so stay tuned.
Until then ... keep on modding!
Featuring a Class A tube preamp and Class D 800-Watt power amp, this high-powered, versatile amp is designed to offer dynamic tonal response.
With years of research, design, and manufacturing expertise in tube circuit designs, the company states this model has been developed utilizing stringent design parameters for form, function, fit, and finish. This latest design blends the warmth and harmonic content of a CLASS A, all-tube preamp -offering three 12AX7 tubes running at a full 300 Volt plate voltage - with a high-output, Class D, 800-Watt power amp module, delivering a professional, high-powered, touring-class bass guitar amplifier, that weighs just over 7 lbs!
Just as the name implies, the Kinetix 800 was designed to be that responsive, kinetic connection of interactive energy between the player’s expressiveness, their technique, and the tonal response coming back to them from the amplifier and speaker system – engaging with big, full notes, quickness, and snap when pushed, or slow harmonic bloom when sustained. It is a simple-to-use, very musical amplifier, and is what a high-voltage tube preamp brings to the player’s dynamic interaction with their instrument through a world-class bass amplifier.
Features Include
- SIX STAGE, CLASS A, TUBE PREAMP (3 x 12AX7 Tubes running at 300 Volts)
- CLASS D, 800-WATT POWER AMP
- MUTE / ON / BOOST GAIN SWITCH
- LEAN / FAT / THICK, TONAL FOUNDATION SWITCH
- 5 BAND FIXED EQUALIZATION NETWORK
- TUBE DRIVEN, XLR DIRECT OUTPUT, w/PRE or POST EQ SETTINGS
- AUX INPUT
- HEADPHONE OUTPUT
- TUNER OUTPUT• DUAL SPEAKON CONNECTORS
- POWER RATING: 400W @ 8 ohms, 800W @ 4 ohms and 2.67 ohms
- DIMENSIONS: 3.25”H x 11.25”W x 11.375”D• WEIGHT: 7.20 LBS
The Kinetix 800 is now available and shipping throughout the company’s global network of dealers as well as online. USA MAP $1,299.99.
For more information, please visit genzleramplification.com.