Review: Beetronics WhoctaHell

TL;DR — The enclosure and style of this pedal is undeniable, but for the price you can get a lot more bang for your buck.

Rating — 5/10

RRP— £219

There’s not a huge amount to say about this guy. The WhoctaHell is an octave fuzz which boasts discrete controls for master volume, fuzz and octave, as well as a toggle control to select -1 or -2 octaves for the sub functionality.

It’s in a custom-designed enclosure with kitschy style touches — I know, pot-kettle-black, but hey — that’s chunky as hell, with a well-laid out, artistic PCB on the insides. In addition to the true bypass main circuit, there’s also a toggle footswitch for the sub octave functionality.

Inspecting the guts shows that this isn’t just one of a number of really old-school designs for octave fuzzes in a fancy enclosure, although racking my brains for the IC markings — CD4040BE and CD4049UBE, if you please — suggests that they’re probably not dissimilar to the ones used in circuits like the EQD Bitcommander, which was heavily based on a DIY circuit whose name I forget, which I think was created by slacker on the forums.

The core fuzz sound is so-so, in all honesty. Beetronics describe it as an overdrive-fuzz, and for my high-gain, high-saturation, maximalist tastes, I never really hear a fuzz-like level of saturation. With the drive fully open and the master up into a smaller tube amp, there’s the beginnings of some decent saturation, but that’s probably as much the amp as anything else when we’re deliberately using a 5W amp for testing.

When the octave is dialled up, it begins to glitch out in a pretty aesthetically pleasing manner, although I kept thinking, “why is this a sub-octave only?” — to me, glitchy octave-up will always be more useful.

Compared to legendary noisemaker circuits with an octave component like the Tim Escobedo TMK, which I’ve built variations of on numerous occasions — I have to say that I’m ultimately underwhelmed.

Anyway, here’s some shots of the rather lovely guts: