I have been wanting to continue this thread but have been too busy. I have been spray painting furniture for a customer for the last couple of weeks. Sometimes the paint will build up around the holes at the tip and if not cleaned off will spit tiny lumps onto the painted surface. The paint job on my former POG2 might have those kinds of particles rather than dust specks.

I did get the Line 6 Roto Machine and it improved the sound tremendously, not just by adding to the illusion of an organ with the rotary effect, but by making the POG2 sound less like a tin whistle. It is the only thing I found that could disguise the POG2’s voicing. Turning down the guitar’s treble reduces the brightness or screechy-ness, as does lowering the low pass slider (thank you for those suggestions), but those things don’t alter the voicing, nor does using eq. Julian, on my POG2 the Q control had no effect on the upper octave, just the lower ones.

Anyway, even with the Rotomachine the overall sound was sour when working with chords. By turning off the Rotomachine and turning down the guitar in the mix, just listening to the POG2, there is a lot of dissonance when running through chord changes, particularly on complex chords. I tried the same experiment on the pitch shifter effect in a multi-effects pedal and got the same result, so I guess it just typical of that type of effect. Then with the guitar and Rotomachine enabled again, most of that is masked but sometimes still sounds sour to my ears.

The results were better when playing single note lines. I had a blast playing the melody of Sousa’s Washington Post march. The tin whistle voicing was a positive for that piece. The overall sound was that of an organ emulating a marching band complete with piccolos. Much more fun than playing the same notes with a plain guitar sound.

It was hard to decide to send it back because it was fun for some things, but too many negatives: the high price, needing other pedals (I would also need an eq, a signal splitter, and a pedal board to be able to play out with it), the sour sound, and the lack of variety in the sounds in it that worked with my music. Electro-melx, I appreciate better now your remarks earlier. Apparently this is about sound shaping, which I didn’t realize before, and requires a lot more equipment than I have to make it work. Next I am going to try a Roland GR-20 guitar synthesizer. The last one I had was the earlier model, GR-33 which I did not use very much, but at that time I had not yet developed the set of fingerstyle arrangements that I usually play now.

Thank you for your help. Maybe this thread will help someone else looking to the POG for getting organ sounds when playing fingerstyle with complex chording. The retailers market the POG’s as “you can get rid of your organ player”, but it is not as simple as that, is it?

There is another issue with the Pog 2 that I did not explore in my posts yesterday. I explained how I must set the + octaves to the lowest audible settings to get good results. Another bad thing that happens if I set the +octave to clearly audible levels is that I get artifacts in the signal. I don’t mean digital artifacts exactly. What happens is that as I remove a finger from the b or e strings, the pitch of the note goes slightly flat, almost inaudibly, but the Pog detects this and converts it into an audibly flat note. As a result, a piece of music will come out with an overall slightly off pitch or sour feel to it. This sound could work well in certain genres but not when one is trying for a clean organ sound. The off pitch sound combined with the tin whistle voicing produces a distinctly cheesey sound.

It is most pronounced on the C note on the first fret of the b string. If I have to play that note while I am holding a chord, then immediately change chords for the next note, the c will change to a b note just as if I had done a pulloff from c to b. This happens whether I play the jazz box guitar or the tele. When I bypass the Pog 2 and listen just to the guitar, the false note is practically inaudible, but the Pog 2 detects it and makes it painfully audible. This just happens when I play the melody while making chords. If I am only playing melody runs sans chords then I can keep these artifacts in check much better.

In the past I have owned two different Roland guitar synths and they had a similar problem. It relates to the fact that in guitar playing one is not just turning a note on and off like a keyboard does, but is making all kinds of other noises. When the device is too sensitive to these other noises then it converts them into unmusical tones. The guitar synths have adjustments that let one lessen the sensitivity to the noises, but the Pog 2 doesn’t seem to have anything to help with that problem.

Question 6. I know that I won’t get many answers from Pog 2 owners as there are not many of us yet, but perhaps some original Pog owners can shed some light on this. Do you have a problem with sour notes, and have you found a way to eliminate them?

Question 7. The warranty card says to mail it within 10 days. How firm is EHX about the time limit? It has already been 10 days since the unit was shipped, and I would like to get a rotary pedal to try with it before making the decision to keep it or not.