Altering the tone of a Tychobrae Octavia clone

soma1975

Hi all,

Bought a prebuilt pedal from Fuzzdog

https://shop.pedalparts.co.uk/product/octavia

Instructions and schematic - http://pedalparts.co.uk/docs/Octavia.pdf

It's a great pedal but its a bit too cutting and aggressive compared to lovely old wedge Octavio I used to own. It's also tons louder but that's not a mega problem. I tended to run it with fuzz a the way off and volume just above unity for that Jimi 'Who Knows' tone.

I wondered if anyone could tell from looking at the schematic how I could mod it to be a bit warmer. Is it a case of the transistors have too much gain? Or could a trimmer be installed somewhere? Or a cap or resistor swap or something? 

Not really sure how an Octavia works to be honest. 

Thanks for any suggestions.

thermionic

I’m not familiar with that circuit but I suspect you’d want to be looking at capacitors connected to the input or output  of a transistor gain stage acting as a filter. C7 and the resisor in parallel with it maybe?

soma1975

So you reckon it wouldn't be as simple as 'replace R1 with 10k trimpot' or similar, or even replacing the transistors with lower gain ones or something?

thermionic

By “warmer” do you mean tone down the treble a bit. When modifying overdive pedals to change the bass/mid/treble it usually involves a resisor/capacitor combination either at the input to a gain (clipping) stage or at an output stage. R1/C1 could fall into that category I suspect but I don’t know enough about Octavias to be sure. 

soma1975

Yep it is very cutting and trebly compared to the nice wedge octavia I had. Cheers man. I assumed everything was stock but perhaps the transistors were too high gain or something.