In the funky wide world of bass playing, there are those who like to get down, while others prefer to get on up. If, musically speaking, you think of your literal up or down octave options as an important part of your bass expression, consider the Electro-Harmonix POG. Polyphonic Octave Generator is its more formal name, and as that moniker suggests, you can use this rugged steel stompbox for everything from the dollop of subterranean fatness or dub-wise boom typical octavers offer, to the screaming, guitar-like higher octaves of a whammy-type pedal. And, as the “polyphonic” part imparts, the POG lets you do this all at once. You can use it to lay on octave layers, staking huge claims on the frequency frontier, or simply emulate a favorite 8- or 12-string.
The POG does all this with a bank of volume sliders reminiscent of the filters and voices on the company’s venerable Micro-Synth and Bass Micro-Synth pedals. But unlike those analog tone-warping classics, the POG generates signals digitally, producing tones one octave below, one octave above, or two octaves above your mixed-in dry signal, with detuned bands on the upper two octaves that add a swirly, slightly out-of-phase dimension for emulating octave instruments like 12-string guitars and 8-string basses. The tracking delay is minimal, and the polyphony is real; unlike with some synth effects, there’s no need to adjust your technique to avoid warps and warbles. Dial in your input level right and you’re as clean as a bean. For guitarists and uninhibited bassists, that can mean fat upper-register chords, as well as synth-like bass lines and make-room-for-me leads and riffs. At the end of the chain of volume sliders a lowpass filter with an adjustable lp filter cutoff adds extra dark-to-bright tone shaping using one of three modes. The first of the lpf modes acts only on the generated octaves, the second also affects the dry signal, and mode 3 has double the Q for a narrower, more resonant peak that’s especially audible if you move the slider while playing.
I found sounds like these and more using the POG through our Soundroom’s Demeter/Crest/Aguilar setup with a Sadowsky Metro J-style bass as well as with an active Fender Jazz recorded through an Ampeg Portabass 250’s direct out in a computer-based home studio. With dry output and sub octave in the middle and the other sliders down, the POG added considerable heft to my dry sound, and sliding lp filter upward gradually morphed the mix from muffled and dark to bright, open, and articulate. Switching to LPF mode 3 and setting lp filter around the lower tick marks brought out different parts of the bottomy boom spectrum when I played certain notes and riffs. Adding and adjusting the other octaves produced a cornucopia of frequency flavors, including an organ-like sound gained through pushing most of the sliders toward the top, and a lead-like indulgence achieved by dropping out the dry signal and sub octave, letting the upper octaves take charge. To keep the sound clean and undistorted, I had to set the input level carefully, lest the POG’s overdriven A/D converters add sandy grit to the dry output signal. Bumping up additional volume sliders sometimes meant needing to back off further on the input volume.
Like other E-H pedals, the POG is housed in a sturdy steel case, but it’s powered by a thin-tethered wall-wart adapter, with no battery option. The rugged on/off footswitch is in the lower right corner, far from the more fragile sliders, and I mostly resisted the temptation to tweak the sliders with my clumsy clodhoppers. My biggest beef with the POG is more of a small request: After another staffer manned the lp filter while I played the resulting wild sounds, I wished the unit had an expression-pedal input that could control the lowpass filter’s frequency cutoff.
The POG is a pricey for a stompbox, but fundamentally there really is nothing like it. It tracks well, works as a beefy sub-octave generator, and lets you get thick with rhythm-and-bass bigness or thin with weedly-weedly guitar leads, if that’s you’re thing. One thing’s for sure: With the POG, you’ll be able to get down and get on up at the same time.