7 octaver
The clue for this pedal is in the name: octavers are pitch shifters, but they deal in octaves only, and usually offer the ability to blend your wet and dry signal.
One octave up replicates the sound of a 12-string (see Radiohead’s My Iron
Lung for a good example), while one octave down will give you a serviceable bass sound, which is handy for recording and looping when you don’t have a low-ender lying about – just ask Jack White, who used it to great effect on The White Stripes’ Seven Nation Army.
Back in the 1990s, octavers really weren’t much to write home about. However, since the advent of polyphonic tracking (which tracks more than one note at a time), pedals such as the Electro-Harmonix POG have been at the forefront of a massive rise in popularity and octaver pedals now rank among the most soughtafter stompers on many pedalboards. They have even given rise to entire bands – listen to Royal Blood’s bassist Mike Kerr who runs his bass into a variety of octave effects to generate a guitar-like tone, with the effect of making the two-piece outfit sound bigger than the sum of their parts.