Death by Audio Octave Machine

The Death by Audio Octave Machine is an early Death By Audio octave fuzz unit, an octave and fuzz effect in one box. What makes it unusual is its construction: rather than a purpose-built pedal, an early unit shown by Daniel Danger was a Boss OC-3 circuit rehoused in a plastic wah enclosure, with the treadle doing the work a knob would do on a normal pedal. Josh Scott of JHS Pedals described it as "like a rehoused boss oc3 with maybe some modifications i'm not entirely sure"¹.

How it works

The treadle is the main control, and it governs one octave voice rather than both. As Josh Scott put it while demonstrating the unit, "the treadle controls controls octave one octave one so like not the sub octave but the other one"¹. In practice, rocking the treadle sweeps the upper octave voice while the sub octave sits underneath it, a layout that comes from the wah-style enclosure rather than from the Boss circuit itself.

The housing is as plain as it sounds. The circuit sits in what the JHS video called "a dime a dozen plastic wall enclosure", the kind of old plastic wah or volume pedal shell that "you could buy those enclosures for 15 dollars"¹. That makes the Octave Machine a very early, very DIY-looking piece of the Death by Audio story, from before the company's later machined-metal pedals.

Sound

The JHS demo presents it as a deliberately harsh octave fuzz. In the video's words, "the worst sounds just mean as"¹, with Josh Scott and Daniel Danger working through octave fuzzes and this unit standing out for how nasty it can get. It belongs to the same family of aggressive octave-and-fuzz designs as the Death by Audio Robot and later DBA fuzzes like the Fuzz War, and it fits alongside other octave effects covered in Octave & Pitch Pedals and Fuzz Pedals.

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