I bought a HOG 2 recently. With the MIDI capabilities I was hoping to be able to configure it before a gig, connect it to my multi-fx pedal and not touch it from that point on; it would essentially be “outboard gear” for my GT-100.

Tried it in the showroom and at home:

The sound is pretty good, but it doesn’t sound very clean. There’s a lot of harshness to the higher octaves especially which needed a lot of tweaking to tame. The Spectral Gate and the Filter help a lot with this. The lower octaves sound beefy (but I think the Boss Super Octave has the edge in low-end clarity). The Filter sweep with the expression pedal sounds awesome, it’s one of the things that sold it to me.

The expression pedal is absolutely hateful. If there’s one thing that does not need re-imagining it’s the bog-standard expression pedal and they’ve added nothing of use with their version. It’s battery-powered so it can die at a gig, it’s not anchored to the floor so it moves all the time, it will sometimes turn itself off(!), it doesn’t track precisely and it doesn’t have a long travel. I only had it because it came free with the pedal; I tried it with an EV-5 at the store and it was so much more usable.

The MIDI programming is fairly straightforward. The manual could be a little more enlightening in places but overall it’s well written and I had no trouble finding a sound and saving it. I was able to use my GT-100 to call each patch with Program change messages and use the CC controls to affect the HOG2 remotely.

But there’s a problem.

You can’t save a preset as “Bypassed”. Any preset you change to will be activated automatically when you send the relevant Program Change. This means that the pedal is always on and chewing up your guitar sound unless you manually switch it off. This is, according to the EHX tech support, deliberate and intentional, but to me seems like a ludicrous oversight. They can save the setting of every other part of the pedal, so why not the bypass? Makes no sense to me. Mine’s going back to the store as it’s useless to me like this.

+ Sounds pretty good
+ Looks great
+ Nice features
+ Can be got at a decent price (£300 with exp pedal)

– Awful exp pedal
– Can’t save a patch as bypassed