THIS PRODUCT IS CURRENTLY OFFERED AS A PRE-ORDER ITEM, PLEASE READ THE INFO SECTION FOR DETAILS
The DOD Buzz Box, one of the worst selling DOD pedals and also one of the most expensive to buy used. Coincidence?
The Buzz Box was an attempt to recreate Buzz Osborne's stacking of the Rat and blue box which didn't even come close to sounding like what it intended to emulate. The Buzz Box did succeed at becoming its own cool and unique sound, recently these pedals have found a resurgence thanks to that JHS geek who won't stop making videos and driving the prices up..... but I digress.
DOD has been known to reuse circuits for other pedal designs, the buzz box distortion circuit is a modified Grunge with the bass control removed. The octave down portion of the circuit is a common CD4013 design found in several octave down designs (MXR blue box, John Hollis crash sync, Guyatone dual octave, madbean lowrider, Craig Anderton Rocktave to name a few)
While the Buzz Box had some cool features there are a lot of options that could have been added for versatility. I'm not one to directly clone a pedal, that's pretty boring so I added a lot of features and got the versatility this pedal needed.
Added features include;
Bass - The buzz box did not originally have a bass control, they probably left this out because there was no room on the circuit boards 4 knob layout.
Soft Clipping - 3 toggle options; Schottky, bypass, silicon. The original Buzz Box does not have soft clipping, this feature is subtle at low distortion settings and adds a smoother curve to the distortion wave as it is increased.
Hard Clipping - 3 toggle options; LED, bypass, silicon. The original buzz box only has silicon clipping, the added LED option gives more of a turbo rat style tone and the bypass turns off the hard clipping completely which cuts a lot of the harshness out of the distortion circuit.
1 or 2 octave down - 2 way toggle allows for 1 or 2 octave down, the original only has 2 octave down
Octave Bypass - The octave down can be switched off via footswitch when not desired. The original design has the octave down engaged permanently.
This pedal also doubles as a signal buffer. A Klon style buffered bypass was added to squash the oscillation feedback that happens with true bypass high gain pedals and also adds signal integrity to a signal chain.
*Note* This pedal runs on a standard 9 Volt centre negative power supply which is not provided, for suggestions on power supplies see the info section.