Dr. No TVL Raven

The Dr. No TVL Raven is a handmade filter and boost pedal from Dutch maker Dr. No Effects, built in collaboration with Troy van Leeuwen, guitarist with Queens of the Stone Age. It is the second pedal in the TVL signature series, following the TVL Octavia, and Dr. No says the two were used on QOTSA's Villains album and tour¹².

The pedal contains two distinct sections: a filter and a booster, which can be used independently or together¹. That layout gives a player three tools in one box: a resonant filter for tone shaping, a clean volume boost for solos and pushing an amp, and the two stacked when a part needs both at once.

A filter and a booster that work separately or together

The Raven's two halves are the reason it exists as one pedal rather than two. Dr. No describes the pedal as containing "a filter and booster effect that can work separately as well as together," a point the maker repeated when the pedal shipped⁵. MusicRadar's Michael Astley-Brown reported the same arrangement at the pedal's announcement³.

For a player, that means the filter can sit on a board as a standalone tone tool, sweeping or parking the guitar's frequency response, while the booster section is a volume-boost control that lets you dial in clean gain¹. Used together, the boost can push the filter harder, changing how the effect reads the signal, or simply add level on top of the filtered tone.

The filter side places the Raven in the same family as other resonant filter pedals, but its controls are unusual: rather than one sweep knob, it splits frequency selection and resonance between two controls, described below¹⁵.

The controls: Skull, Q and volume boost

The Raven has three main controls, split across its two sections.

The Skull knob is the pedal's signature control. It is a capacitor switch that selects three different frequency ranges for the filter, so a player jumps between broad tonal zones rather than sweeping continuously². MusicRadar described it the same way at announcement: "the raven skull knob adjusts a capacitors for three different ranges"³.

The Q potentiometer shapes the filter's character, controlling resonance or bandwidth¹. In practice, a lower Q setting gives a wider, softer response, while a higher Q narrows the filter into a more pronounced peak, the kind of vocal, honky resonance associated with envelope and fixed filters.

The booster section is deliberately simple: a single volume boost knob for clean gain¹². There is no tone control or clipping stage mentioned for the boost; it is a level tool, and the maker positions it as clean gain rather than overdrive.

Part II of the Troy van Leeuwen signature series

The Raven is the second pedal in the signature series Dr. No Effects created with Troy van Leeuwen, and it completes the set of two¹². Dr. No announced it in March 2017, saying the pedal followed "nine months of intensive development" in collaboration with the QOTSA guitarist⁴². MusicRadar called it the Dutch maker's second collaboration with Queens of the Stone Age³.

The first pedal in the series is the TVL Octavia. Dr. No says the Octavia was built with the signature QOTSA sound as a guideline, with van Leeuwen sharing "some of his sonic secrets" for the project⁶. RockBoard's PedalPedia describes the Raven as complementing the Octavia in a shared tonal vision, and both pedals were used on the Villains record and tour¹².

The Raven was released on April 2, 2017, after a preorder period at Dr. No's own shop⁴³. At preorder in March 2017 it was listed at €268, approximately £231 or $291³.

Where it sits for a player today

The Raven is a signature pedal in the strict sense: it was designed around one player's needs and documented use, on the Villains album and tour¹². A player shopping for a filter pedal today gets something less common than a standard envelope filter, namely a fixed, switchable three-range filter with adjustable Q, plus an independent clean boost in the same enclosure. Compared with the TVL Octavia, its series partner, the Raven is the tone-shaping half of the pair, while the Octavia carries the octave-up fuzz character associated with the QOTSA sound¹.

Videos

Click to load

Click to load

Questions