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Whoa! Someone’s having a little too much fun here.
Start with the nine-word product name: Dr. No Road Runner Octave Fuzz Wah Flying Machina. Then there’s the enclosure: peach-fuzz flocked in loud blue and red. And the rubber treadle pad, embossed with a lurid three-color design. And the pièce de résistance: rubber Hermes-style side-wings. (The control labels and product notes cleverly inscribed on the wah’s bottom plate include a warning: “This device actually flies … cannot be held responsible for physical damage like broken bones just because you can’t fly the damn thing.”) Color me amused.
Dutch boutique brand Dr. No created this outrageous contraption with and for David Catching, the Eagles of Death Metal guitarist and owner of Rancho de La Luna, a famed recording studio in California’s Mojave Desert. Beneath Machina’s hilarious cosmetics lies a straightforward octave fuzz/wah effect with a few cool twists.
You Shall Not Pass!
I can’t tell you what’s inside the Flying Machina because I couldn’t open it. Perhaps it’s been deliberately battened down for secrecy’s sake. The pedal has no battery option—you must use a 9V power supply. So there’s no reason to remove the plate unless you’re a stompbox busybody.
Dr. No describes the octave-fuzz circuit as an “old school” Octavia. The original Tycobrahe Octavia employed three silicon transistors plus a transformer and a pair of clipping diodes. There are two knobs: boost (distortion amount) and volume. The Machina adds two popular Octavia mods: an octave on/off switch (it bypasses the octave-generating transformer for a conventional fuzz sound) and what sounds like an input-trim control. (At any rate, dialing it back yields the same result as rolling back your guitar’s volume knob.) While you can switch the octave effect on and off, fuzz and wah are always active—you can’t use either alone or invert the effect order.
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