Syracuse, New York’s CMC Guitars And Effects has created a triple-octave beast of a fuzz pedal for The Fall Of Troy guitarist Thomas Erak. Named the Triple Octave Manipulator, this all-analogue octave fuzz has a trio of octave voicings – sub, root, and upper – each of which can be used individually or mixed together.
There are Gain and Volume controls for each of the sub octave, root and upper octave sections, with a Master Volume controlling the overall output to your guitar amp. More sounds are available by way of a four-way chickenhead dial that selects from four wave shapes that dramatically alter the character of the octave effect.
With Clean, Synth, Square Wave Sub and Unison Square Wave modes on hand, the Triple Octave Manipulator can really take your electric guitar tone off road, allowing players to add crazy, glitchy qualities to their leads or simply give their fuzz a monster sub-octave bass power via the Clean mode.
Each of the four modes have their own uses. If Clean is ostensibly the most straightforward, ideal for lower octave power, Synth, as the name might suggest, introduces more harmonic synth-style weirdness, while gated octave-fuzz sounds can be found with the square wave settings, with the Unison Square Wave giving you the option of taking the sub-octave from the mix.
As Andy Martin explains in the demo above, precise single-note runs – particularly above the 12th fret – will yield the most predictable results, but this sounds very much like the sort of pedal whose magic lies in the unpredictable, mangling chaotic fuzz signals and offering an alternative to the common-or-garden Fuzz Face clones. It sounds very cool.
The Triple Octave Manipulator has been on Erak’s rig for some time, and a small batch of the TOM pedals already having been made available for sale. Each is built by hand in small numbers in Syracuse, New York. Indeed, even the TOM’s enclosure art and manual was designed by a local graphic designer, Pat Bright. For more details, follow CMC Guitars And Effects on Facebook or Instagram, and check out CMC’s Reverb page for listings.
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