A Fun and Unusual New Boss Clone - The OC-2 Octave!

It's been a little over a month since I finished up my most recent Boss clone builds (if memory serves, it was the double DS-1builds I did back in mid-March). This time around I'm doing something a little different - on a lot of levels. For this build, I'm using the PedalPCB Ocelot Octave board which clones the Boss OC-2 Octave pedal. Honestly, this is one of the more unusual pedals I've built as it adds an additional tone one and two octaves below whatever not you're playing. Octave 1 is useful across most guitar ranges, but I find Octave 2 gets a bit muddy depending on your pick attack if you're playing low bass notes on the guitar. On the higher strings, having the three octave tone is really pretty cool though. The OC-2 appears to be out of production, and used copies seem to run the gamut on Reverb from about $150 to over $300 depending on condition, so this is another great candidate for cloning!

As you can see from the (very) crowded PCB above, this is a complex build like many Boss pedals. Like the Thermionic Deluxe I built last month, the board has all of the values actually silkscreened on the board itself. That makes it harder (but not impossible) to screw things up. For PedalPCB builds, I tend to have the BOM next to me so I can count out how many individual resistors, capacitors, or other components I need of each value. I then go hunting on the silkscreen for those values and populate them. I'm using all high-end components for this build. The resistors are all Yageo or KOA Speer 1% tolerance. The film capacitors (of which there are surprisingly few!) are WIMA or Kemet. The electrolytic capacitors are mostly Nichicon with a couple of Panasonics thrown in. All of the ICs are sourced from Mouser, so I know they're all legitimate. Interestingly enough, the build called for "germanium" diodes - but doesn't specify. I ended up using 1N34A diodes (with the blue stripe near the center and left hand side). While challenging because of the tight confines and large part count, the board was otherwise straightforward with very little in the way of exotic components.

The enclosure itself is one of my "second generation" Boss style enclosures - with an homage to the "Waza Craft" line of Boss pedals. I'm really happy with how the graphics came out. Unfortunately you can't get a brown (or in this case, bronze) enclosure from Tayda - so I sort of had to fake the look of the Octave pedal as to make it match the original. I think it gets close enough to the mark for government work!

As to the sound - honestly it sounds pretty much exactly like the Reverb demo below - though you notice they tend to have Octave 2 turned down most of the time and only turn it on for so higher register work at the end. I think this is on purpose! That being said, it's a really cool pedal, but it will likely only see niche use on my board for specific songs.