The debut release from the new pedal company offers switchable ‘59 and out-of-phase modes in a run of 500 units.
The 1959 Les Paul known as Greeny passed from Peter Green to Gary Moore before ending up with Kirk Hammett, and its out-of-phase middle position has been a sought-after sound ever since. Moore’s son Jack has now helped bring it to the pedalboard with the Burstphonic PAF, the first pedal from Octaking Labs.
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The company grew out of a chance meeting between songwriter and producer Aryan King and P.A.F. pickup specialist Alexey Dovnar, and Jack Moore worked with King before Octaking launched, giving feedback and approving the final design. Moore describes the tone they were after as “a living thing – mid-forward and singing, with this bloom after the note.”
To get there, the team measured inductance, impedance and resonant peak response with a spectrum analyser, drawing on Moore’s late-’90s signature model and his 1959 Les Paul “Stripe”, along with isolated DI tracks from “Parisienne Walkways”, “Need Your Love So Bad” and the album Blues for Greeny.
The pedal is fully analogue and reshapes the incoming signal to match the response curves, midrange and bloom of a vintage P.A.F., rather than emulating amp saturation, with controls for level, bass, sparkle and P.A.F. Two mini switches handle the voicing. Greeny mode models the phase cancellation and frequency curve of the guitar’s famous accidental modification, in which the neck pickup’s magnet polarity was flipped, while ‘59 mode follows the dynamic envelope of a late-’50s P.A.F., with bloom in the lower mids and clear highs. The second switch sets the pedal up for either a Strat or a Les Paul, so single-coil players can get in on it too.
Octaking is limiting the Burstphonic PAF to 500 units worldwide.
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