O
f all the wonderful
developments in guitar
gear brought forth by the
rapid advance of digital
technology, the proliferation of
polyphonic octave effects is one of
the most exciting. Everyone loves a
good octave, whether to add some
meat and complexity to a solo, or to
make a big riff sound even bigger.
However, while often sounding
awesome in the right context, the
monophonic analog octave effects
of days gone by are also notoriously
glitchy and temperamental. The
tracking is sluggish and unstable,
and sometimes unusable, depending
on where on the neck one plays
and what pickup is being used. If
you aren’t careful, things turn into
a garbled mess very quickly, thus
limiting the usefulness of these
effects to only a very narrow set of
musical circumstances. And of course,
getting musical results from chords
or arpeggios is not possible.
All of this changed when digital
processing came on the scene.
Early digital octave and pitchshifting effects had their own
problems, including stability and
latency issues, but as the technology
grew and matured many of these
problems were sorted out. Today,
we have seen a veritable explosion
of digital polyphonic octave effects
that track quickly and reliably. The
beauty of these boxes is that they
can expand the voice of a regular
old guitar or bass in dramatic ways,
letting a six-string guitarist mimic a
twelve-string guitar, a