POG

Pitch-shifting pedals weren’t new. The Whammy had been around for years, but its tracking could be erratic, with an alien warble that didn’t suit everybody. Digital octave pedals tended to sound artificial, and most could only follow one note at a time.

The POG, short for Polyphonic Octave Generator, came out in 2005 and could follow a whole chord, strummed or picked one note at a time, without glitching. David Cockerell, back working for Electro-Harmonix once more, is the designer credited with it.

The original gives you three extra voices on top of your dry note: one octave down, one octave up, and two octaves up, each with its own level. You can detune the upper octaves, roll off the top end with a filter, and give that filter a resonant peak. It came with an 18-volt power supply in the box.

Electro-Harmonix pitched it as a way to make your guitar sound like a 12-string, or an 18-string, or a drawbar organ, or a bass guitar. For a band with no bassist, that last one is not a small thing.

White thinks he got there first. “I think I was the first person to record with one on the White Stripes song ‘Blue Orchid,’” he said in 2010. “‘Blue Orchid’ came out two weeks after the session, so it had to be the first song to feature the POG.”

Two weeks is his memory. The single came out on 18 April 2005, which is more like five weeks after the basic tracking. Joe Satriani had one too, and Guitar World tells it as a race between the two of them to get it on record, with “Blue Orchid” just beating Satriani’s “Super Colossal.” He started recording that album around September 2005 and released it in March 2006.

Satriani used his very differently. He was after something enormous and slow:

I came up with a sound that I thought would bring to mind a guitar player that was standing 50, 70, 100 feet tall, and walking through your town playing a big, slow riff.

And he says he used the POG “in a very subtle way” to get there. Put on the title track and listen to the main riff. That’s the giant.

John Frusciante found the organ hiding in it. On the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Stadium Arcadium in 2006, he used the POG on “Snow (Hey Oh).” In his words: “During the outro section I used an Electro-Harmonix POG, which adds multiple octaves and makes the guitar sound like an organ.”

So wait for the outro. The guitar stops sounding quite like a guitar. He did the same trick on the second chorus of “She Looks to Me.”

The White Stripes went back to it. In January 2007, at Blackbird Studio in Nashville, they tracked “Icky Thump.” Asked in 2010 how he got the tone for the ascending riff, White kept it short: “That’s the POG.”

Careful with the rest of that song. The solo is a different chain, a Zvex Wooly Mammoth and a DigiTech Whammy. And careful with “Seven Nation Army,” too. That famous low riff is the Whammy, not this. Electro-Harmonix also brought out the compact Micro POG in 2007, and White never said which one he used on “Icky Thump,” only that it was the POG.

By 2010, playing with the Dead Weather, he described his effects the same way as in the White Stripes: “I have a Big Muff and a Whammy... Sometimes, I use a POG pedal.”

The original POG was big, and the smaller versions that followed found more pedalboards. In 2009 it was discontinued, and the POG2 replaced it, with a second octave down, an attack control for slow swells, and presets. In 2024 Electro-Harmonix announced the POG3 and called it the most powerful POG ever.

It started with a present, sent to a house in Detroit where two people were making a record. One of them played guitar. On “Blue Orchid” he sounds like a whole band.