Octave Divider / Synth Pedal

[joey1294]

Stumbled on this on Instagram. The sounds in the video are pretty awesome. Thoughts on pedals like this?

 

https://goo.gl/bZ4yNk

[WRGKMC]

Synths were the big rage back in the 70/s 80/s. They seemed to pretty much disappear completely from the music scene.

 

The video has some cool tones but I'm not a huge fan of guitar synth pedals. The problem with triggering a pedal like that is, in order to get a good tone and tone lock you really need a pure sine wave. Guitars don't produce pure sine wave and have allot of overtones which create false triggers. In order to get a good lock you have to remove most of the treble and even compress the signal to get a sustained lock and even then picking stings is critical.

 

There's usually a large time delay between picking the string and getting a lock too which I hate the most. Some pedals can do much better then others too. Some of the old ones were dreadful. Some of the newer ones are much better.

 

The unit looks to be a sold build and if its something you think you can utilize with your music go for it.

 

To be honest, I never use synth pedals much. I have one that does similar things I bought recently which is fairly unique. It syncs an arpeggio synth effect to the units built in drum machine and changes these arpeggio scale changes to the notes you play. It will take chords played and chop them up into chord patters that match the drum beat. For example it can take a Latin drum beat and give you a Latin chord pattern from a single chord strum or note.

 

While this is a fun toy to diddle around with I really don't have much use for it performing live or recording. I only paid $30 for it and find more uses with its other features. As for a pedal that's strictly a synth, If I play with a band doing cover music none of the songs I play have synth tones. If I record and write my own music I get better results using an actual Mini Moog which I own. If I had one of these I'd be afraid it would simply wind up on a shelf collecting dust and I can find much better uses for the $450 one would cost.