Black Cat Bass Octave Fuzz

The Black Cat Bass Octave Fuzz is a bass fuzz pedal from Black Cat that puts an octave-up fuzz voice on top of your bass tone while keeping your clean signal in the mix. It is built as a modern recreation of the Maestro Bass Brassmaster, a rare 1970s bass octave fuzz¹². Where most fuzz pedals swallow a bass's low end, this circuit's design lets you dial the dry signal back in, which is the whole reason the Brassmaster design has stayed interesting to bass players for fifty years.

Premier Guitar, reviewing the pedal in September 2026, described it as "a modern and compact re-creation of the Maestro Bass Brassmaster"¹. In an earlier Premier Guitar demo from 2010, Shawn Hammond summed up the sound plainly:

A bass fuzz with an octave-up

The pedal produces two things at once: a fuzz voice, and an octave-up voice that rides on top of it. The octave-up character of the Brassmaster family is not a clean, synth-like pitch shift. BLAMMO! Electronics, describing the original circuit it also recreates, characterizes the Brassmaster's sound as "raw octave-up fuzz tones with glitchy expressive artifacts that could be blended against the original guitar signal"⁵. That glitchiness is part of the appeal for players who want a fuzz that reacts to how hard they play and where they are on the neck, rather than a uniform wall of gain.

For bassists, the design solves the classic fuzz problem. A conventional fuzz circuit clips the whole waveform, which thins out the fundamentals a bass depends on. The Brassmaster approach blends the effected signal against the dry one, so the fuzz and octave sit on top of a clean low end instead of replacing it. That makes it a natural fit for the bass pedals crowd, and it is why the design keeps getting revisited by boutique makers.

A recreation of the Maestro Bass Brassmaster

The Maestro BB-1 Bass Brassmaster, the circuit this pedal traces back to, was a 1970s octave bass fuzz. MusicRadar describes the original as "an octave bass fuzz with an onboard dual-voice ring modulator, opening up a full spectrum of harmonically unorthodox" sounds, and notes it is now super rare and sounds great on guitar too². That rarity is what drives the recreations.

Black Cat is not alone in revisiting the circuit. Performer Mag, in a 2020 retrospective on the Brassmaster, noted that "there are a few boutique pedal companies that have tried to recreate the Brassmaster. One pedal that gets us close to the original is the Black Cat Bass Octave Fuzz"⁴. More recently, GuitarPlayer reviewed the Totally Wycked Audio Krytical Mass KM-01 Reactive Octave Fuzz, another pedal inspired by the early '70s Brassmaster⁶. Players comparing Brassmaster-style pedals today are effectively choosing among these modern interpretations, since the originals are scarce.

Controls and blending

The pedal carries three knobs. Premier Guitar's review breaks down how they work together¹:

The Bass knob is the one that matters most to bassists. As Premier Guitar puts it, "The Bass control is effectively a mixer control to balance the effected and dry signals"¹. Run it toward the dry side and you get a clean foundation with fuzz and octave layered over it; run it toward the effected side and the fuzz takes over more completely. In the 2010 demo, Hammond made the same point about the design: "The Bass Octave Fuzz allows the player to blend the clean signal into the mix along with the fuzz"³.

The Drive and Fuzz knobs interact rather than working independently. Premier Guitar notes that "the other two knobs, Drive and Fuzz, work in tandem to produce the pedal's fuzz effect"¹, so finding a sound is a matter of balancing the two rather than setting each in isolation.

What reviewers said

Published reviewers have been positive about the pedal across a long span of coverage. Premier Guitar's September 2026 review is the most detailed, and its most striking finding concerns noise:

That is an unusual trait in a fuzz pedal, where high gain settings often bring hiss along for the ride, and it matters for anyone recording or playing at low stage volumes.

Performer Mag's 2020 retrospective framed the pedal's value in terms of the original it recreates: "It is priced at $210, which is astronomically lower than the original"⁴. The same review placed it among the closest of the boutique Brassmaster recreations then available.

Price

Premier Guitar listed the pedal at $225 street in September 2026¹. Performer Mag had it at $210 in May 2020⁴, so the price has risen modestly over six years. As Performer Mag put it, that figure is "astronomically lower than the original"⁴, which is the practical case for a recreation: the same circuit family, at a fraction of the cost, in a compact modern enclosure.

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