The Idea

The Pollyanna begins our move away from the comfort of straight laced overdrive and distortion pedals. The basic idea of this pedal was to combine the most common types of dirt and nasty analogue octave effects in one unit. With this pedal if you are after a smooth polished polyphonic digitised octave then forget about it and look elsewhere. One thing to keep in mind with this pedal is you cannot just play like ‘normal’ and turn the pedal on. This is a pedal which you need to work with and meet half way to get the best result.

The Features

 Sensitivity Control: It is an input gain control to the three octave circuits and it works in 2 ways. For the +1 Octave it acts as a level control, and then as the sensitivity control is turned up higher, as a kind of fuzz control. For the -1 & -2 Octaves, this control will adjust the sustain of the synth circuit. The higher the sensitivity control, the longer the sustain. For very low settings of the sensitivity control, you may find that the lower octaves do not track at all. This is normal.

+1 (Octave Up): This is a vintage octave effect that works by rectifying the audio signal to roughly ‘double’ the frequency. The octave effect is strongest using the neck pickup and playing around the 12^th fret.

-1 & -2 Synth Octave Down: This is square wave heaven where you can turn an otherwise articulate and dynamic instrument into something resembling a games console (think commodore 64/Atari/super Mario) from the early eighties.

Tone: The tone control balances the low and high frequency content of the octave signals only leaving the dry signal as is.

Dry: This control allows you to dial in a high quality buffered version of the original dry signal to taste.