The Drolo Giant Hogweed is that rare Opamp Fuzz Beast that delivers Octave Fuzz in both directions

This is to a significant degree a public service announcement as a lot of readers have been asking me recently if I knew about a Fuzz which had both Upper and Sub-Octaves. I knew there had to be at least one, but the Giant Hogweed had somewhat slipped my mind for a while - and I really struggled to find this particular genre out there in the wild.

It turns out that nearly every single Octave Fuzz pedal out there is either Upper-Octave or Sub-Octave only - while almost never both. In fact I think this is the only one I’ve encountered or recall having encountered which features both and allows them to be deployed simultaneously.

Controls are - Gain, Texture (Bias), Up (Octave), Level, Tone, and Down (Octave). The two footswitches allow you to engage the Fuzz (On) and Octave Effects (Oct) separately.

Of course I would have preferred a compact enclosure format to a degree - but this is really elegant too in its own way - with 6 simple control knobs and the ability to engage the Octave effects separately.

This is an Opamp style of fuzz - with usually the TL070 chip employed in the core tone generation role. So sort of Rat / Muff-adjacent really with the addition of those two octaves. I understand the Texture knob to be a sort of bias control which obviously impacts the output in the typical way.

If you readers know about any other dual-octave-fuzzes do let me know - and I can start building a reference library of those too.

Now that you know of the Giant Hogweed - is this something you are considering to add to your own rig?