There is a moment every two-piece band knows well. The guitarist cranks a fat power chord, the drummer hits, and the room fills up — mostly. Something in the low end is missing. No bass player, no bottom. Unless, of course, there’s a small rectangular box on the pedalboard doing the heavy lifting of an entire second instrument. That box is the Electro-Harmonix Nano POG, and it has been solving that exact problem since 2015 with ruthless efficiency and a footprint smaller than a deck of cards.
But the Nano POG is not just a bass replacement trick. It is the most compact expression of a pedal lineage that has shaped modern rock tone since 2005 — a lineage that includes the original POG, the Micro POG, the HOG, the POG2, and every subsequent EHX polyphonic octave device. The Nano POG takes that heritage, strips it to the bone, adds one key feature the Micro POG lacks, squeezes everything into the standard EHX nano enclosure, and ships it at a current draw of just 25 milliamps. For a digital pitch-shifting device, that number borders on the miraculous.
Three knobs. Two outputs. One footswitch. Sixty-six pro artists on Equipboard. That’s the Nano POG story, and it goes deeper than those numbers suggest.
The POG Family Tree: From Flagship to Nano
To understand the Nano POG, you need to know where it comes from. The original EHX POG — Polyphonic Octave Generator — launched in 2005 as a full-format pedal that swept every major guitar publication award that year. The core concept was radical at the time: a completely polyphonic pitch-shifting effect that could track full chords without glitching. Every note in a chord got its own octave-transposed voice, simultaneously, in real time. Prior octave pedals were monophonic — play a chord and the tracking collapsed into a glitchy mess. The POG didn’t care. Strum an open-G chord and all six strings got shifted up an octave, down an octave, or both at once.
The original POG was large and full-featured, with controls for two octaves up and two octaves down plus envelope filtering. The Micro POG arrived next: same three-knob concept (Dry, Octave Up, Sub Octave), smaller enclosure. Then came the HOG (Harmonic Octave Generator), the POG2 in 2009 with added slow-attack, low-pass filter, detuning and preset storage, and eventually the Nano POG in 2015.
The Nano POG is, as Premier Guitar reviewer Joe Gore put it, “basically a Micro POG in a smaller B-sized enclosure.” But that slightly glib description undersells a crucial hardware addition: the Nano POG has a dedicated Dry Out jack. The Micro POG does not. That single extra output jack changes how the pedal can be deployed on a professional rig in ways that matter enormously, and we’ll come back to it.
What the Nano POG Actually Does
The Nano POG generates two additional voices from your input signal: one octave below (Sub Octave) and one octave above (Octave Up). You control the volume of each independently with dedicated knobs. A third Dry knob controls the volume of your original signal at the Effect Out jack. Turn Sub Octave up, back off Octave Up, and you can make a guitar sound like it has a bass player following every note. Turn Octave Up up, blend with Dry, and you approach the 12-string guitar territory — or at least something adjacent to it.
EHX’s marketing claims a convincing 12-string simulation, and Premier Guitar’s review is diplomatically honest: “blended tones sound nothing like a 12-string guitar, though they might pass muster for tossed-off 12-string parts on a casual cover-band gig.” The sub-octave is the more convincing voice — deep, fat, with a percussive attack suggesting a pickstyle bass. The octave up is the more synthetic of the two: functional, useful, sonically distinctive, but not naturalistic.
Both voices are polyphonic. Play a full barre chord and every note in it gets shifted. This is the foundational technological achievement that made the POG family a fixture in professional rigs. It is also why, as Gore notes, “most players won’t need to refine their touch, or even concentrate — these octave effects simply work.” The tracking is genuinely forgiving. Strike an adjacent string by accident and you won’t get a glitch. Play a complex chord voicing and it tracks. Dig in hard and it tracks. The polyphonic engine does not care about your pick attack dynamics.
There is latency. All digital pitch-shifting systems introduce some delay between input and output. On the Nano POG, that latency is nearly imperceptible when Dry is blended in, because the attack of the dry signal masks the fractional-millisecond delay in the pitched voices. At 100% wet (Dry knob fully off), skilled players can compensate by playing fractionally ahead of the beat. In practice, most Nano POG applications run with significant Dry in the mix, and the latency is not a problem in live or recording contexts.
Specifications
Famous Players: What the Nano POG Record Actually Shows
The broader POG family has an impressive roster of serious players. Dan Auerbach of The Black Keys has been associated with Micro POG and POG2 use across multiple Black Keys records — the low-end heaviness of tracks like “Howlin’ for You” is partly a polyphonic octave story. Matthew Bellamy of Muse has used POG variants in his complex rack rig. Tom Morello has experimented with EHX pitch tools. But these associations are with specific POG variants — Micro POG, POG2 — rather than the Nano POG specifically, and they should not be attributed to the Nano POG without per-SKU verification.
The cleanest confirmed primary-source Nano POG user in the current research is John Notto of Dirty Honey. In Premier Guitar’s April 2022 Rig Rundown (filmed at Dirty Honey’s headlining show at Nashville’s Marathon Music Works, written by Chris Kies), the setup is documented precisely: Notto’s Nano POG “has the octave-up dialed down a bit and is only used on the band’s cover of Prince’s ‘Let’s Go Crazy.'” That is a specific, song-specific application documented with direct observation — the most credible class of gear attribution available.
The Prince connection in that application is worth noting. “Let’s Go Crazy” is built on organ-driven, keyboard-rich rock. Using a Nano POG with the Octave Up engaged gives a guitar signal enough low-organ harmonic weight to approximate what keyboards bring to that song in a live rock-guitar context. It’s a textbook use case: not trying to fake a 12-string, not trying to disappear a bass player, but using the pedal as a texture tool for a specific cover arrangement.
Equipboard’s tally of 66 pro artists using the Nano POG suggests a wide professional user base beyond what primary-source documentation captures. It is a pedal that appears on working boards across genres — rock, alternative, indie, metal — often because it is compact, power-efficient, and does something no other nano-format pedal does as cleanly: polyphonic octave splitting with a separate Dry Out.
Tone Recipes and Settings
Bass Replacement / Two-Piece Band Floor Rumble
This is the Nano POG’s most compelling single function. Set Sub Octave at about 9 o’clock (just beginning to appear in the mix), Octave Up at zero, and Dry at noon or higher. The sub octave fills the low register without dominating. For heavier floor-shaking: bring Sub Octave to noon or above, route the Effect Out into a bass amp or a PA direct input while your guitar signal continues to your guitar amp from the Dry Out jack. You have created a two-amp, two-register spread from one instrument. The Dry Out jack is essential for this application — it outputs your clean guitar signal independently of the wet mix at Effect Out.
Organ Approximation
Run both Sub Octave and Octave Up at moderate levels (both around 9-10 o’clock) with Dry at noon. This three-voice blend — fundamental, octave below, octave above — is the core of the organ-like sound EHX has been chasing since the original POG. It works best on single notes and simple voicings. Complex chord extensions get harmonically dense and can blur. The polyphonic tracking handles it, but human ears perceive the harmonic complexity as a wash rather than a chord. For simple rock organ lines — something moving through the major scale in power positions — this setting is genuinely effective.
Subtle Octave-Up Shimmer
John Notto’s actual live setting: Octave Up “dialed down a bit” (somewhere between 7 and 9 o’clock), Sub Octave off or minimal, Dry at unity. The result is a slight shimmer and harmonic brightening on top of your core guitar tone. Engage it for a moment, disengage. It colors a chord rather than transforming it. Useful for song-specific texture, particularly in rock arrangements that need a keyboard-like harmonic ceiling.
Noise / Chaos / Fuzz Integration
Premier Guitar’s Joe Gore specifically tested Nano POG with fuzz placed before it: “the darn thing still tracked — and sounded — great.” This is an important real-world data point. The Nano POG’s polyphonic tracking engine is not easily confused by saturated, compressed, or fuzz-degraded input signals. Most monophonic octave pedals require a clean, clear signal to track. The Nano POG does not. Place a Big Muff, a fuzz, or a gate before the Nano POG and the octave voices ride along. The result is wide, dissonant, and loud — Sub Octave engaged into fuzz produces low-end frequencies that can rattle a room with appropriate amplification. Gore’s verdict: “Run Nano into a good fuzz and just stand back.”
12-String Adjacent
This is the setting most beginners try first: Octave Up at 9-11 o’clock, Dry at unity, Sub Octave off. The octave-up voice adds brightness and harmonic doubling. In a mix, particularly on recorded guitar with the level balance right, it can suggest a 12-string jangle. Live and solo, it doesn’t quite get there — the Octave Up voice has the slight grainy quality that digital pitch shifting produces. Use it for recorded layering tasks or for covering arrangements where 12-string jangle serves the song rather than a trained listener inspection.
The Dry Out Jack: The Feature That Changes Everything
The single technical detail that separates the Nano POG from the Micro POG — and that justifies its existence as a distinct product rather than simply a smaller Micro POG — is the Dry Out jack. Understanding it matters.
In normal single-output operation, the Effect Out jack sends a mix of Dry + Sub Octave + Octave Up to your amp. You blend the three voices with the three knobs and send one signal. That’s standard octave pedal operation.
With the Dry Out jack, you have a second output that always sends only your buffered dry signal, independent of the Effect Out mix. This enables a fundamental routing split: your dry guitar signal goes one place, and your octave-treated signal goes another.
Practical applications: send the Dry Out to your guitar amp (preserving your tone chain cleanly) and the Effect Out to a bass amp (sending the sub-octave voice to the appropriate speaker for that frequency range). Send Dry Out to your normal effects chain and Effect Out to a reverb or delay pedal that processes only the pitched voices. Use Dry Out as a tuner feed while Effect Out runs into the rest of your board — the buffered output gives a clean signal for a tuner without loading the circuit.
It also means the Nano POG’s bypass mode behavior is worth noting. The pedal uses buffered bypass, which means the Dry Out is active and buffered even when the effect is bypassed. For germanium fuzz users, the standard placement consideration applies: place any germanium fuzz before the Nano POG, not after, to avoid the impedance mismatch that a buffered output creates for high-impedance fuzz circuits.
Nano POG vs. Micro POG vs. POG2
The POG family has accumulated enough variants that the decision tree matters for buyers. Here is the honest breakdown for guitar players.
The Micro POG and Nano POG share the same basic concept: three knobs, one octave up, one sub octave, dry blend. The circuits are different and produce slightly different voicings — forum consensus is that the Micro POG has marginally better tracking on fast passages and a slightly less grainy Octave Up voice, though this is debated. The Micro POG is in current production and available; it lacks the Dry Out jack. If you need the Dry Out routing capability, the Nano POG is your answer. If you don’t need that routing, the Micro POG is available new and sounds very similar.
The POG2 adds significant features: slow-attack control (lets you build into the octave voice like a bowed string), low-pass filter (tames the brightness of the Octave Up into something more organic and keyboard-like), detune control, and two programmable presets. It’s a much larger pedal physically and draws more power. For players who need those features — particularly the slow-attack, which transforms the organ simulation from decent to convincing — the POG2 earns its footprint. For players who want simple set-and-forget octave control, the Nano POG is the right tool.
The POG3 and Pico POG represent the current EHX lineup. The Pico POG compresses the same three-knob concept into an even smaller format. The POG3 expands the palette further. For a straightforward, nano-sized octave pedal with a Dry Out jack and 25mA draw, the Nano POG remains the benchmark — though used units are now the primary acquisition path given its current availability status.
Signal Chain Placement
Where you place the Nano POG in your signal chain changes what it does dramatically. The standard approach is before overdrive and distortion: your clean guitar signal feeds the Nano POG, the octave voices are clear and tracked accurately, then the entire mix (Dry + octaves) feeds into drive pedals. The drive processes all voices together.
Placing the Nano POG after overdrive and distortion (or using the fuzz-before-POG approach PG tested) sends a saturated signal into the octave engine. The polyphonic tracking still functions — this is the key advantage over monophonic octavers — and the result is a denser, more complex processed tone where the octave voices carry the distortion character. The distinction is subtle but real: octave-then-fuzz is cleaner on the pitched voices, fuzz-then-octave is thicker and more chaotic.
In a Dry Out split routing, the chain question becomes more nuanced. Drive pedals after Effect Out process only the wet octave signal; Dry Out feeds your guitar’s primary chain. This is the configuration that allows truly independent treatment of dry and octave voices.
Buying Guide: Nano POG in 2026
The Nano POG is currently listed as “not available” at EHX direct, suggesting it may be discontinued or temporarily out of production. The used market is the primary acquisition channel. On Reverb, Nano POG units in excellent condition consistently trade in the $100–$150 range. New-old-stock units (if found) command a premium. At that used price point, the Nano POG represents exceptional value — there is no competing pedal at that price in the nano footprint that delivers polyphonic octave splitting with a separate Dry Out jack and 25mA draw.
The Micro POG is the closest current-production alternative and sells new in the $130–$180 range. If the Dry Out jack is not a priority feature for your routing scheme, the Micro POG is equally valid and easier to find new. If the Dry Out matters — and it matters more than many buyers realize when they discover split-amp routing — seek a Nano POG on the used market.
Power supply planning is straightforward. At 25mA, the Nano POG is the friendliest digital nano pedal EHX makes. Any isolated 100mA output handles it with room to spare. Compare: the EHX Canyon draws 150mA, the Oceans 11 draws 150mA, the Freeze draws 140mA. The Nano POG is the easy one on any power supply. The optional 9V battery compatibility (battery not included) adds genuine portability for fly-date or acoustic-room situations where power is uncertain — at 25mA, an alkaline 9V runs several hours.
Ownership Notes
The Nano POG is a set-it-and-leave-it pedal. Three knobs with no hidden parameters, no secondary functions, no MIDI, no presets. What you see is the entire interface. This simplicity is a strength in live performance: there is nothing to accidentally bump into a wrong state, nothing to remember to reconfigure between songs, nothing that requires a manual to recall. Set your balance, engage the footswitch, done.
The buffered bypass means the Nano POG keeps your signal buffered even when off. In a chain with many true-bypass pedals, a single buffered pedal is generally beneficial for signal integrity over cable length. In a chain already well-buffered (many Boss or TC pedals), it is neutral.
The Octave Up voice responds to the guitar’s harmonic content in the input signal. With humbucker-equipped guitars and higher-output pickups, the Octave Up can become slightly aggressive. With single-coil guitars (Strat, Tele), the Octave Up is brighter but blends more naturally into the mix. Neither is wrong — it’s a voicing preference that players dial in quickly.
Do not expect the Nano POG to compete with a dedicated bass player. The sub-octave voice is a useful approximation for certain contexts: it fills low frequencies, it suggests bass movement, it shakes floors in a two-piece band setting. In a full band context with a real bassist, running Nano POG’s Sub Octave creates frequency competition and muddiness. The pedal is most at home in sparse arrangements where its sub-octave voice has room to breathe.
The Nano POG’s Place in the EHX Nano Line
Over the past several articles in this series, we’ve worked through EHX’s nano lineup: the Holy Grail Neo (75mA, reverb), the Pitch Fork (30mA, polyphonic pitch shifting with expression), the Freeze (140mA, infinite sustain), the Canyon (150mA, delay and looper), the Oceans 11 (150mA, eleven reverb algorithms). The Nano POG at 25mA is the most power-efficient of the group — the one pedal in this nano lineup that a basic pedalboard power supply handles without a second thought.
The Pitch Fork and Nano POG are functionally adjacent but serve different roles. The Pitch Fork is a polyphonic pitch shifter covering the full interval range from minor 2nd to 3 octaves, with expression-pedal capability for dynamic pitch sweeps (as used by Jonny Greenwood). The Nano POG is specifically an octave device: one octave up, one octave down, nothing else. If your octave needs are defined — sub octave bass replacement or octave-up shimmer — the Nano POG’s simplicity is the correct tool. If you need variable intervals, harmony generation, or expression-pedal pitch control, the Pitch Fork is the correct tool.
FAQ
Is the Nano POG polyphonic — can it track chords?
Yes. Polyphonic tracking is the foundational design principle of the entire POG family since 2005. The Nano POG tracks every note in a chord simultaneously. Strike a full six-string barre chord and every note gets its own octave voice. This is what distinguishes POG-series pedals from older monophonic octave pedals that glitch when given chord input.
What is the Dry Out jack for?
The Dry Out jack outputs only your buffered dry signal, independent of the wet octave mix at the Effect Out jack. This enables split routing: send dry guitar to one destination (your guitar amp, your primary effects chain) and the octave-processed signal to another (a bass amp, a reverb pedal that processes only the octave voices, or a direct recording input). It is the key functional difference between the Nano POG and the Micro POG, which has only a single Effect Out.
What’s the difference between Nano POG and Micro POG?
Both use three knobs (Dry, Sub Octave, Octave Up) and generate the same octave relationships. The Nano POG is slightly smaller and adds a Dry Out jack. The circuits are different and produce slightly different voicings — Micro POG is widely regarded as having marginally cleaner octave-up tracking, while Nano POG’s dual-algorithm approach produces a slightly different character. The Micro POG is currently in production; the Nano POG is currently listed as unavailable from EHX. Both support optional 9V battery.
Does the Nano POG need a special power supply?
No. At 25mA, it is the most power-friendly digital nano pedal EHX makes. Any isolated 100mA output handles it. The included 9.6VDC-200mA adapter works. An optional 9V battery (not included) is also compatible and will run the pedal for several hours given the low current draw.
Can I use the Nano POG with bass guitar?
Yes. The polyphonic tracking works on bass. The Sub Octave voice drops a full octave below bass fundamental, entering very low frequency territory. The Octave Up on bass produces a guitar-register harmonic doubling. Both can be useful for bass applications. Note that EHX specifies Mono audio — the Nano POG is not a stereo device.
Where should the Nano POG go in my signal chain?
Standard placement is before overdrive and distortion, allowing clean tracking into driven tones. However, the Nano POG’s polyphonic engine handles pre-distorted input well — placing fuzz or overdrive before the Nano POG still produces accurate tracking and creates a denser, richer texture. Try both positions and choose based on the character you want: octave-into-fuzz is cleaner on pitch; fuzz-into-octave is thicker and more complex.
Is the Nano POG discontinued?
As of 2026, EHX lists the Nano POG as “not available” on their direct site, suggesting it is either discontinued or experiencing a prolonged production gap. New units remain available through some third-party retailers and on the used market. The Micro POG is the current in-production alternative with similar core functionality; the Pico POG is the smallest current format. For Nano POG specifically, the used market is the most reliable acquisition channel at this time.
What artists use the Nano POG?
John Notto of Dirty Honey is the most cleanly documented primary-source user: confirmed in a Premier Guitar Rig Rundown (April 2022) using it specifically for their cover of Prince’s “Let’s Go Crazy” with the Octave Up “dialed down a bit.” Equipboard documents 66 pro artists using the Nano POG across genres. The broader POG family has a much larger confirmed user base including artists across rock, alternative, and metal — but those associations often involve Micro POG or POG2 rather than the Nano POG specifically.