[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING GUITAR WITH THE JIM DUNLOP JIMI HENDRIX OCTAVE FUZZ ENGAGED]

OWEN O'MALLEY: Welcome back to Gearwire.Com. I'm Owen O'Malley, and this is the Dunlop Jimi Hendrix Octave Fuzz. I guess you should say the Jimi Hendrix System; I don't know what that's all about, but this is sort of basically a recreation of the Roger Mayer Octave Fuzz that Jimi Hendrix popularized and continues to popularize, and it's a very sort of interesting effect. To call it a distortion effect is -- well, it's probably the easiest way to categorize it but it doesn't -- It's not a sort of like typical distortion effect, and the controls get a little -- they take a little getting used to, and it probably doesn't as good by itself as it does in front of an overdriven amp or another distortion pedal. We'll kind of take a look at that in a second here, but it is a true bypass pedal and it's only got two controls here. Let's listen to our clean tone here.

[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING GUITAR WITH THE JIM DUNLOP JIMI HENDRIX OCTAVE FUZZ BYPASSED]

I'm playing a P90 equipped Telecaster through a '59 Bassman reissue. Now let's turn this guy on.

[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING GUITAR WITH THE JIM DUNLOP JIMI HENDRIX OCTAVE FUZZ ENGAGED]

Now you can see that the volume is very, very low and it's already super, super high. That's one of the things that is sort of a tell-tale sign of the fact that this pedal is really designed to overdrive an amp or overdrive even more a pedal that it's in front of. Let's just leave the volume there right now because if you turn it up without a pedal in front of it, it kind of gets crazy but let's play with the tone control here.

[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING GUITAR WITH THE JIM DUNLOP JIMI HENDRIX OCTAVE FUZZ ENGAGED, TONE KNOB ALL THE WAY DOWN]

When the tone is all the way down here, it almost acts as like a fuzz amount too, but you can start to hear that octave overtone.

[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING GUITAR WITH THE JIM DUNLOP JIMI HENDRIX OCTAVE FUZZ ENGAGED, TONE KNOB ALL THE WAY DOWN]

And when you bend notes against each other, it almost has a sort of like ring modulator effect as it kind of how the pedal tries to figure out how to process the two sort of like bending tones.

[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING GUITAR WITH THE JIM DUNLOP JIMI HENDRIX OCTAVE FUZZ ENGAGED, TONE KNOB ALL THE WAY DOWN]

Which sounds really cool when turned on with another pedal. We'll get to that in a second. Let's turn the tone up.

[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING GUITAR WITH THE JIM DUNLOP JIMI HENDRIX OCTAVE FUZZ ENGAGED, TONE KNOB ALL THE WAY UP]

So you can hear it -- Tone control is again a little bit of a misnomer. It really is sort of it's almost like a fuzz saturation. It does serve to make it a brighter sounding tone but also a more distorted tone.

Let's put it in front of a Tube Screamer and hear what we can do when we've got two pedals hooked up to each other.

Okay, so now we've got our Octave Fuzz hooked up in front of a TS-808, an Ibanez Tube Screamer Overdrive Pro. Let's just listen to the Tube Screamer by itself first.

[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING GUITAR WITH THE IBANEZ TUBE SCREAMER ENGAGED AND THE JIM DUNLOP JIMI HENDRIX OCTAVE FUZZ BYPASSED]

And now let's kick on the Octave Fuzz.

[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING GUITAR WITH THE IBANEZ TUBE SCREAMER AND THE JIM DUNLOP JIMI HENDRIX OCTAVE FUZZ ENGAGED]

You'l hear not only is that sort of octave tone coming through loud and clear but it's also acting as quite a bit as a volume boost even with the volume down at about 9 or 10 o'clock right here. Another cool, really cool thing that happens when this pedal is in front of a distortion box like a tube screamer is that when you bend the notes against one another, you get this really crazy kind of like almost like flanging or a phasing sound. Check this out.

[OWEN O'MALLEY PLAYING GUITAR WITH THE IBANEZ TUBE SCREAMER AND THE JIM DUNLOP JIMI HENDRIX OCTAVE FUZZ ENGAGED]

It almost like a bit of a ring mod tone there as the sort of, you know, the octave harmonics are kind of like you're bending against each other to create some pretty cool effects there. So there you go. That's the Jimi Hendrix System Octave Fuzz by Jim Dunlop, the Gin Dunlop. Gin Dunlop!? I'll have a Gin Dunlop please. I'm Owen O'Malley, and you've been watching Gearwire.Com. Delicious!