JONNY OVERLOAD

Some years ago I spent a week or so hanging out with Jonny Lang, a local and national bluesman who had a need for a very high double-octave pedal to simulate the very eerie high octave guitar note at the end of Purple Haze, a single released on March 17th, 1967 by The Jimi Hendrix Experience. That sound, impossible to create live at the time, was a studio effect produced by Chas Chandler and Eddie Kramer using a Roger Mayer Octavia pedal and half-speed recording, resulting in the final sound effect of two octaves up. I made Jonny Lang a pedal that had two octave-doubling circuits in it using transformers and germanium diodes, which are often used to produce fuzz, but in this case were carefully steering around a clean waveform, folding the signal coming from the guitar in half and in half again to create a simulated double octave up. I called it the Jonny Octave. We ultimately released this pedal as a ZVEX product but it was not and has never been a popular product. We've continued to sell it because it's quite unique and has a very interesting texture. But then something weird happened.