One of the last projects that I worked on for Lerxst was the Snowdog fuzz and octave fuzz. This was to be the companion to the By-Tor Overdrive that was released in 2023. Both pedals would use the same two-button style enclosure but with an inverted image to match the name of Snowdog.
When we first started discussing what the Snowdog would be, they were looking for a fuzz-style circuit that was close to what was used on “Working Man” from their first album. Digging through some of the Rush archives, and from what Alex remembered, it was a Foxx Tone Machine.
First Revision
The first version had a few tweaks to the circuit (mainly in the tone control) and changed the octave-up switch to a footswitch. The original circuit used 2N3565 transistors and germanium diodes to achieve the fuzz and octave-up; however, these have been long out of production and would limit the production. So, I experimented with modern production transistors and diodes to get the same feel as the original circuit. The first prototype was sent up to Alex to test out. After messing around with it, it needed a little more “something.”
Second Revision
After getting some feedback, I decided to remove the switch for the octave-up of the Tone Machine and add in an Octavia circuit to give a different flavor of octave-up. I updated the Octavia circuit as well for modern production and to play well with the Tone Machine. The fun part is now you can swap the order of the circuits for even more fun or dime the gains for insane over-the-top fuzzy oscillation. They named this the “abominable Snowdog” setting. This became the final version of the pedal and was released in 2024 through Reverb.
