Sorry, been offline for a good while.
I forgot to say how fantastic the colors and layout look on this. A favorite.
Side note. I owned a 70s Block logo Blue Box and Dunlop's 1st reissue Blue Box at the same time years ago. The reissue was significantly lower volume than the original one for some reason and sounded a little less smooth overall.
I have a late 2000's scrip logo reissue. I've almost always run it into a Rat or overdrive, never alone, due to the volume drop. Into a Rat you can get that great "Charmicarmicat" sounds. As for smooth, I know no such thing.
As for the octaver stuff, here's some thoughts from over the years...
My idea for the blue box with green ringer is definitely all about being a nightmare version of the old Mutron Octavers and is rather particular to my setup interests. Seeing as I typically run both the BB and GR into a Rat, I never really thought much about the GR not being dirty. Though my diy GR has a nice robotic overdrive sound to it. Love the thing. I recall good germanium diodes being key to it sounding fantastic. Silicon sounded harsh.
Still, this design has a few marks against it. One is complexity. GR plus BB plus buffered parallel circuits (possibly with a fuzz or dry blend added). That's all a bit more than a Rat, Muff, or Fuzz. Not rocket science, but you are talking manufacturing and layout development time. Plus you have the question of what controls to add. A "tone" knob on the BB can be nice, but you begin to lose the elegance of the originals. I would have called the Psychopomp.
I always wanted to build a Mutron clone, but several years back I splurged on a lovely Foxrox Octron (3?). Wow, that is a nice octave pedal. It also has an overdrivey not-quite-clean clean upper octave. This one is rather smooth and not very robotic. Sounds great, but lacks the chaos. One plus is having a knob per octave (sub 1, clean, up 1). I usually blend in a little sub with the main sound being a blend between the clean and the upper. Sounds bad ass, but definitely tamer than my other boxes. Not sure if it is a GR or something different. The sub is very clean. All very nice, but you lose some excitement.
One thing I take away from the Octron is the value of a clean blend on a GR. If my micro GR had a clean blend, it would be my favorite. On it's own it is just a bit too much for wider application. With clean blended in I'd get all the lovely overdriven telephone garbles but riding under the more intelligible dry signal. Bonus if I could cram it into the same micro sized enclosure as my first GR. Note: I do like playing full blown open chords through my GR. I like how it sounds. Messy overdriven stuff. It's almost a great oddball cleanish tone, hence the desire for a clean blend. These days I use a little Hotone bit crusher thing for similar clean-with-trash-underneath sounds.
As for alternative suboctave sounds, the EQD Bitcommander uses a 4024BE instead of the old diode arrangement or CD4013. It is covered somewhere in
this long ass video. Then there's the cleaner method from Mutron, Boss (and Arion!), but I forget all that.
One simpler ideas is to just more or less do a Mutron style circuit (still not a tiny design) or simpler alternative with a gnarly fuzz added after both the clean, up, and sub paths. On the safer side, folks have gotten a ton of milage out of modding a Bazz Fuss circuit. Definitely provides plenty of eq range with a tiny amount of parts. With so few you could make a separate BF circuit tweaked to each octave band. It would take some tweaking and judgement no matter the fuzz design to avoid too many knobs. Could get away with Dry, Up, Down, and Drive.
A wild up and down Balls octave fuzz would be rad, but it will probably take a chunk more time for Tony to make happen. Totally something he would make amazing, but the guy has to be cost effective.
