no need for pics, but i got an OC-2 yesterday.... I've been looking at octave pedals for a while, had convinced myself I wanted the newer Harmonist pedal, but while waiting to have an extra 160 dollars laying around found an OC-2 for 30 dollars. got it, it's great.... but, can anyone clue me in to how to get rid of the stairstepping sound?
like... when I'm playing with it I can hear the octave step down after a few seconds of letting it ring... you know?
something I'm doing wrong?
current pedal chain is DS-1 into Big Muff into OC-2 into Small Clone... into my 78 peavey pacer...
is it finally time to buy decent cables? I'm running some cheap junk patch cables.

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~Dan

Octave pedals normally work best before distortion, as the added harmonics can cause them to track badly and do the 'stepping' thing they're looking for the fundamental, which gets more smeared as you add distortion.

Not many of them avoid it completely, but if you give them the purest tone to work with, you can get decent results.

No Pic, No Pedal! lmao

Some octave pedals "hunt" for the right note if you let a note ring out for a while,that seems to be the nature of the beast.I have a Danelectro French Toast Octave Up/Fuzz pedal and it doesn't do the octave splitting unless you play around the 12th fret and higher,any notes played below the 10th fret won't double up no matter how much you fine tune the pedal.All pedals seem to have their own lot of annoying little idiosyncrasies that you have to try and circumvent.

Unless you opt for an authentic Roger Mayer Octavia at around $280 US,or some other big ticket pedal you are pretty well stuck with temperamental performance.

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'65 Strat,65 Mustang,65 Jaguar,4 more Strats,3 vintage Vox guitars,5 Vox amps,'69 Bassman with a '68 2-15 Bassman cab,36 guitars total-15asst'd amps total,2 vintage '60s Hammond organs & a myriad of effects-with a few rare vintage ones.

Put a clean boost in front of it and turn the tone down so that it gets just the fundamental sound boosted. Run it in a split if you need to so that the pedal just gets a low tone high signal level input. This will help quite a bit.

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My ability to spell is in direct proportion to the amount of coffee I've had.

well, i tried putting it before the distortion, no change. then i tried changing settings and trying to find a "sweet spot"... no change. then i even took everything else out, just ran my guitar through the oc-2 and into my amp.... and it was just as bad, if not worse. i think this pedal might be junk. i've played with a handfull of oc-2 ,oc-3, and harmonist pedals in the last few weeks...none of them did this. wtf. guess its true, you get what you pay for.

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~Dan

Sounds like a faulty pedal to me.
Cheap cables weaken the signal or they distort/make noises but they don't make the octave stepping down. I would vote for a failure in the digital circuit of the pedal.

I've used octavers before and use one of the new OC-3s now (octaving chords!!).

Standard setup is: guitar --> amp --> effects loop out --> pedal board (behind distortion, if I use one) --> effects loop in --> final amp stage.

Never had a prob, no matter what order of effects I used (except for not sounding perfect in some orders I tried). Octave was octave, with no change/ no stepping up/down in any way.

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Kindest regards from Germany, Dee
My recordings --> http://www.soundclick.com/bands/page_mu ... dID=564337
STRATS ROCK!!! but Teles and Firebirds, too!

wish i could do that.. i've got a 1978 peavey pacer with no effects loop to speak of. this pedal is probably getting put in my junk box.

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~Dan