Gearwire gets a plateful of Electro-Harmonix's delicious HOG Guitar Synthesizer. The HOG, or Harmonic Octave Generator, is a veritable bag of unique tricks. It contains nine polyphonic pitch shifters that can be mixed in with your original signal to add all kinds of craziness: an octave down, two octaves down, a fifth up, an octave up, an octave and a perfect fifth up, two octaves up, two octaves and a major third up, three octaves up, and four octaves up. All of these values can be mixed together in any combination your little heart desires. Add to that dual envelope generators, a low-pass filter, six expression modes, an optional external expression pedal, and an optional foot controller, and you're in HOG heaven. Unlike "true" guitar synthesizers, the HOG requires no special pickups or connections.