Great but with flaws

I have and will continue to use this pedal, as I love the functionality and usability. I split my bass signal with this pedal, sending my wet signal into a guitar amp (full wet with none of my bass signal mixed in). The dry goes back into my switcher and the rest of my bass pedals, and then into my bass amp.

Pros

• Having the ability to switch between octave up, octave + 5th, and the octave + 5th + 2nd octave with your feet is at a L awesome. As are the wet and dry outputs.

• Tracking is really good. The caveat here is you need to use the trim pot, and put this up front in the signal chain. When set up right it tracks as well or better than any other octave pedal I have used with a bass (I have used many).

Cons

• The tones it creates on its own aren’t great. Not anything close to a natural sounding electric guitar. The pitches and tracking are great, but you need to put something (or multiple things) after it in your signal chain. I switch between a EHX Mel9 (Melotron emulator) and a Mooer 011 Dual Cali (Mesa Dual Rectifier emulator). The “overdrive” on the pedal sounds like crap. So you need to put a better dirt pedal after this pedal if you want to make good sounding “powerchords”.

• The end of the decay can get a little weird if you let notes ring out really long. If your using the 3 note powerchord setting, it works best with straight ahead of 1/4 note or 1/8 note type songs and riff based stuff.

Overall it’s a very useful and fun pedal. Sometimes I just use the octave with heavy distortion (via my Dual Cali pedal) to double a bass riff with a lead guitar sound (like when we cover Hysteria by Muse). I use the other three octave combinations with my Mel 9 to add strings/orchestra or choir sounds (ex: Orchestra for “When you were Young” by the killers and the choir setting on Radioheads “Paranoid Android”). It was fun at a recent gig to see the sound guy jolt up and look confused when I punched in the full orchestra in the middle of The Killers and then watch him confusedly look for a keyboard player (we don’t have one). And I use the 3 note power chord setting with my Dual Cali to mimic an additional high gain rhythm guitar during guitar solos or at the end of a song climaxes (to bring the dynamic to 11).

I just wish another manufacturer took a shot at this design and added a better distortion circuit and found a better way to manage decay/tracking/noise gating at the end of long sustained notes. You can work around these limitations with additional pedals and appropriate application (this isnt an always on type of pedal). So it’s a 4.4 for me. It’s a unique pedal, and I haven’t found anyother pedal quite like it. As I noted earlier, I just wish a more electric guitar/bass pedal focused maker with some more “rock and roll” DNA took a stab at this concept. I feel like EHX could nail this using some of their existing POG circuits. Or maybe JHS could mod this with a Rat circuit. Wishful thinking…

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