Vahlbruch FX Octavia

The Vahlbruch FX Octavia is an analog, handcrafted fuzz pedal that produces octave-up "OctaFuzz" sounds spiced with ring modulation, in the style of the legendary Tychobrahe Octavia pedal. RockBoard's PedalPedia describes it as producing "exactly the wild 'octave-up/octa-fuzz' sounds spiced with ring modulation that Jimi Hendrix, Jeff Beck" and players of that era made famous¹. It is made in Germany².

Unlike a modern digital pitch shifter, the Octavia does not track notes. Its octave comes from a special transformer with downstream clipping diodes, the same topology as the 1970s Tychobrahe original, which folds the input's harmonics upward into a rasping, ring-modulated double-octave character that responds to where you play on the neck¹. Delicious Audio's buying guide notes of this family of circuits: "The Octavia's circuit is all analog, of course, so no polyphonic pitch tracking here"³.

What it does to your sound

In OctaFuzz mode the pedal generates the wild octave-up fuzz sound associated with the Tychobrahe circuit, spiced with ring modulation rather than a clean pitch shift. This is the character of the transformer-based octave fuzz rather than a tracking octave pedal²¹.

A toggle switch selects between OctaFuzz and Fuzz modes. In the Fuzz setting the Octavia works as a pure fuzz with the octave-up removed, so one pedal covers both the screaming octave sound and a conventional fuzz tone².

The V2 controls

The current V2 version has three knobs plus the mode toggle:

The Edge control is the main practical difference for a player comparing V2 against a used V1: it lets you dial back the top-end harshness that the original circuit delivers at full tilt, or open it up for the V1's full bite¹.

V2 also changes the clipping. Where the V1 used new old stock germanium diodes, the V2 uses Schottky diodes, which RockBoard's PedalPedia calls "an absolute speciality" giving the pedal a very specific character¹. Delicious Audio reported the March 2023 update as adding the Edge control, the Schottky diodes in place of germanium, and the MagTraB footswitch⁴.

MagTraB switching

Instead of a mechanical true-bypass switch, the Octavia uses Vahlbruch's MagTraB switching: a magnet inside the footswitch button is measured by a sensor on the circuit board, and a micro-controller switches a gold-plated relay². For a player this means the click-free, wear-free relay action Vahlbruch fits across its range, rather than a standard stomp-switch.

Versions and the Tychobrahe Octavia circuit

The Octavia name goes back to Roger Mayer, who built octave-fuzz units for Jimi Hendrix. The Tychobrahe Octavia of the 1970s was a commercial descendant: Roger Mayer states that "The Tychobrahe clone or more correctly put innaccurate copy was based on a 1969 variation of Octavia for 24 Volt operation"⁵. The circuit later resurfaced through builders such as Dave Fox, who received the original schematics and a new old stock Octavia from people who ran Tycobrahe⁶.

The Vahlbruch Octavia follows this lineage with the same core topology, a special transformer with downstream clipping diodes¹². It sits in a crowded family of Tychobrahe-derived pedals, including the Tru-Fi Octavia Fuzz, which is likewise based on the Tycobrahe Octavia and offers a switch to turn the octave off for a 70s fuzz tone⁷, and the Beetronics Octahive V2, also based on the Tycobrahe circuit⁸. On the original-design side, Roger Mayer still builds his own units, such as the Purple Haze Octavia, which runs on a battery or nine to 24 volts DC⁹. The Vahlbruch differs from most of these in its MagTraB relay switching and the V2's Schottky-diode clipping.

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