Guild Tri-Oct

This is a weird one that Guild made somewhere in the late 60's or very early 70's. It uses a proprietary hexaphonic pickup that gets screwed into the top of the instrument, presumably as close to the bridge as possible. There aren't many guitars around these days with no bridge pickup, and this one takes up considerably more real estate than the Roland synth pickup. It works fine; its just hard to find something it will work with. There are 6 trimpots, accessible through the rear panel, to allow adjustment of string-to-string balance; a nice feature. No foot-accessible bypass switch, just a slid switch on the rear panel. Front panel has slider pots to balance the level of the three basic sounds: octave-down, straight, fuzz.

The Tri-Oct is a kind of precursor to the EH Microsynth, producing (if aligned properly) hex octave down, straight guitar signal, and a fuzz with an almost octave-up, simultaneously. The only thing that is really exploiting the hex processing is the octave down, which isn't bad, but isn't exceptional. On the other hand, I have had to install it (with duct tape) in between the bridge and neck pickup on my Epi Coronet(not optimal positioning) and I play it through a tweed Princeton with an 8" speaker (not optimal for fart-free bass). Still, being able to produce two octave down notes at a time is twice as much as any other octave divider will do.

This unit is about the size of a shoebox, in an aluminum case, with a 3-way footpedal (on-off for straight, octave down, fuzz) and cable of modest length. More importantly, the hex pickup connects directly to the unit, and the cable for the pickup is only about 6 feet or so. This is NOT a unit suitable for gigging, folks. Studio or private noodling only.

Not applicable.

I picked this up because it was kind of a missing link in the history of effects and guitar synthesis, and I had never heard of it or seen one anywhere before. Like much of early guitar synth technology, responsiveness is not its strong suit, although to be fair using a hex pickup does improve its tracking as an octave down box. There is precious little sputtering or mistracking, and being able to produce polyphonic octave down is a genuine rarity, even nowadays. Having said that, the physical awkwardness of the unit (including the pickupmounting, and footpedal), and absence of stompable bypass switch (it's a slide switch on the back panel), make it the kind of thing you brush the dust off once in a blue moon, like a ring modulator, and use for special purposes.