I recently picked up an EHX HOG. It's obviously not a new effect, but I thought there were not enough reviews of it around here, and more perspectives are always good IMO.
I won't dwell on the features, because everyone knows them. The 2 octaves+maj3rd is mislabeled on the manual and the front panel, which could be somewhat vexing for people who don't realize.
The Freeze-gliss is kind of the star of the HOG, and I'm sure you've all seen videos using it. It's a very cool feature, but it isn't exactly what I expected. The idea is to freeze a note or chord, then, by particular manipulation of the expression pedal, glissando into the next note or chord you play. Here's where it gets a little funky:
Doing fast or medium-speed glissandos works perfectly. No complaint. It's when you try to do a slow gliss that the HOG kind of wonks out. Playing a single note, then setting the exp. pedal to gliss very slowly to the next, it seems that the individual harmonics actually gliss at different speeds, and occasionally not all in the same direction (more on that in a sec).
This makes sense, since I am guessing the HOG is using FFT - the algorithm just divides up bins and shifts them, so it makes no attempt to assemble bins that are harmonically related or occurring simultaneously in time (this would be extremely complex and might mess up shifting of chords). The end result can be (again, this is only on super-slow glisses) a little weird. And I generally like weird, but this is not how I would want this feature to work. This becomes less of a problem with harmonically simple tones, so if your bass sound is relatively free of highs and mids I wouldn't anticipate it being a problem.
The other thing, mentioned briefly above, is that the glissando sometimes goes the wrong way. The reason for this, I believe, is the way the "gliss" probably works. I think it does a basic comparison of the frozen note and the next-played note, and decides, "is this higher or lower?" If higher, it kind of indiscriminately bends the pitch of the held note up, while fading the held note out and fading the new note in. So it doesn't so much gliss from A to C, but just bend A up, while fading it out and fading in a C note. At fast speeds, this is indistinguishable from real gliss, but at shoegaze speeds, it becomes noticeable.
So occasionally it tries to gliss from A to the C above it by bending down to some inaudible pitch and fading in a C...
Tool fan says:
"But can it do 5th up->OCT up??"
Indeed, it can.
I saw plenty of argument about this in old threads, but no conclusive statements. So I will tell you with authority, that Tool nerds can do the mythical 5th up/oct up without a Bass Whammy, and have way more functionality.
Tool fan says:
"But how? It doesn't look like it!!
You need the Moog expression pedal, or one that's been modded with a maximum range pot (easy if you know which end of the soldering iron gets hot). All sliders down except fifth up. Toe down. Set the sidemounted pot until you hear an octave (a/b-ing with your bypass signal). Then turn up the dry volume pot. There you have it. Your dry note, unshifted no matter where the exp. pedal is, plus a shifted note, a fifth up at toe up, octave up at toe down.
Everybody knows that this can make you sound like an organ, and that's cool. But what needs to be said is that this pedal allows you to play things that you could never play otherwise. Most effects are pretty much purely timbral, and though they influence what you play (generally limiting it), most don't add to your compositional abilities. The HOG does. I have a Sustainiac pickup in my bass, so I already have infinite sustain, but the HOG's envelope-shaping abilities, in addition to the pitch control, make a bass into an entirely different instrument. I've built some guitar synths before, and many of them allow you to sound very much like a subtractive synth. But none of them allow you to play like a synth, besides the HOG.
So... I like it.
