© 2014 Spicetone OÜ www.spicetone.com Võistluse 9, Tallinn 10132, Estonia, European Union
2.4 P
OLYPHONIC
D
ISTORTION
With normal mono pickups, overdrive sounds nasty with complex chords. This is because of
intermodulation distortion. With hexaphonic pickups, you have a separate overdrive for each
string, so that each overdrive has room to flourish.
Intermodulation distortion introduces spurious signal components with frequencies that were
not present in the original signal, based on the sum and difference products of the original
frequencies. The introduced frequencies are often not related harmonically to the original
frequencies, so the resultant newly generated frequencies are perceived as being non-musical. In
human language: overdriven normal pickups can sound nasty in a bad way.
Polyphonic (hexaphonic in most cases) distortion means there is a separate distortion circuit
per string. Thus the nasty intermodulation distortion is eliminated. Internally, 6Appeal has 6+1
distortion pedal circuits, one for each string and one for monophonic signal. You can play
complex harmonies just as you would do with clean or acoustic guitar.
As each string has its own turf in the hexaphonic mode, you get huge orchestral harmonics from
you guitar. Try playing you electric guitar like an acoustic. The complex harmonies you would
have normally avoid, sound great. You can really fill the stage, if you hook up two amps and use a
bit of stereo panning. Yes, 6Appeal has outputs for stereo and even stereo panning effect.
2.5 A
NALOGUE
S
UPERIORITY
Our guitarist friends have noticed that 6Appeal feels like a tube amp, especially like a certain
classic British amp. Play "God Save the Queen" by the Queen and you get the point.
An example of analogue superiority, the pedal is sensitive to picking technique. You can go from
practically clean to heavily overdriven in the same setting.
