Digitech The Drop

Do you need to play in several tunings but don't want to constantly change strings each time? Or, you don't want or can't afford to have one guitar for each tuning? Meet the Digitech Drop. It down tunes your guitar in half steps until one octave. It can also work as a simple octaver, as it is also capable of mixing your dry signal with an octave down signal (50/50 mix). You can press the button one time to activate the pedal, and another to deactivate, or keep the foot on the button to activate the effect and just release it to turn it off (functions selectable by a toggle switch). You can select your tuning with a knob. Simple enough. Just put it right after your guitar in the signal chain. But what about the sound? These technologies are not perfect, but they're almost perfect, and if you know their limitations, you'll be perfectly happy with the results. The first thing I noticed when the pedal is active is that the signal volume is a little bit reduced. So, hitting the front of your amp, in a clean channel you'll feel you have a little less volume and in a dirty channel you'll feel that you have a little less gain. Some people say that the pedal cuts a little bit of the highs. That's not true. What happens is that, on full chords, while analyzing the frequencies in your signal, as it is working its magic, it kinda emphasizes lower frequencies. It's kinda like you loose a bit of the sustain on higher frequencies when playing full chords. As you do a full chord, you'll hear all the strings, but the thin ones will stop ringing sooner, but if you ring the thinner strings again, you'll hear them loud and clear and they'll sustain normally. Your results might vary with different pickups. One thing I noticed that seems to help is increasing the volume of the signal going into the pedal (as if you are compensating for the loss of output from the pedal). I also have a discontinued Morpheus Droptune that essentially does the same thing, but the Morpheus is more than twice the size. As it is getting older, it's doing a little bit of noise sometimes, so I bought the Digitech one just in case. I've been using this technology for some years now and it suits my needs perfectly, practicing at home, at rehearsals and live. Another limitation that this technology has: if you select very low tunings on the pedal, you might start to hear some artifacts. This is why I have just a few guitars in different base tunings and use the pedal to lower them up to 3 half steps (1.5 full steps). People say the limit is about 2.5 full steps (5 half steps) and after that you get artifacts. I can't confirm or deny (as I only go down 3 half steps) but here's the information anyway just in case. With all these cons I think I might be making it sound worse than it actually is. This pedal works great. It just has some limitations in some very specific situations and you can work around them. If you have doubts about buying it, don't! There's a reason this pedal is constantly out of stock everywhere. Yes, supply is not the best right now, but when they're in stock, they seem to sell right away, and that happens for a reason: this pedal is that good!

I love this pedal! I've used it to "transpose" a song on the fly when the singer decided to change keys at the last minute. Super easy! Took all the guess work out around the faster chord changes. Yes it changes your sound a bit, but not really that noticeable in the mix. It would be almost completely unnoticeable if you were using other FX (like overdrive or distortion or a thick chorus ... etc) in conjunction with The Drop.
I've also used it as a drop tuner with my 4 string. Just set the switch to momentary and when you want a lower D or C or B or whatever ... just stomp and hold. Not as crisp as playing a 5 string but a handy alternative to a 4 string with a Hipshot D-tuner.
And I've also used it as an octaver pedal - which I really like the sound of. I've found the TC Electronic Sub'n'Up coloured my sound too much. This is a octaver with your clean tone 50/50 mix. Very thick and tidy.
So used as an octaver - fantastic!
A sparingly used "5th string" addition / Hipshot D-tuner alternative - very useful!
And entire "transposed" songs - doable. You might be the only one who notices the change in your tone.

For a bedroom guitarist this is a must have. Its the single most useful effect pedal. If you are like me, who loves learning songs for fun, you know how frustrating it can be when you want to learn a song but its in a different tuning, and now you either mess with your tremolo guitar for 10-30min to re-tune it and set it up or you just don't learn the song/riff... even if you have a fixed bridge the string tension will change so it wont be as good as whatever tuning your guitar is set up to.
This pedal is a game changer! It basically like having 5-6 guitars at once, because you can instantly de-tune your guitar with one click.

Now if you are in standard E you can de-tune all the way to A standard, but at that tuning i would say the sound quality is not that great. The lowest I can go that still sounds good is C# , I used that in a live setting and it was alright. Some will probably say that they can tell its de-tuned by an effect, but I still, i think its alright. If you just go to D# or D its basically impossible to tell that its de-tuned by a pedal.
However its still good for practicing, I often use it in B standard when i want to play some amon amarth songs, its great.

Its also great if you write a riff and you want to try how it sounds in different tunings.

One thing to note, is that if you use it for practicing at home, you still want the amp to be relatively loud because if its too quiet and you can still hear the natural sound of the strings, it can mess with your hearing.

In a nutshell, this pedal is a must have if you like practicing in different tunings even if you think the sound quality is not good enough for live playing.

This pedal is a big time money saver. For a bedroom player like myself it's a must have unless you have deep pockets and can afford to buy many guitars assigned for different tunings. So don't be intimidated by the price of something like this. Think of it like a guitar money saver. You'll basically save a great amount of money on this pedal. Dropping a semitone is as easy as turning the knob on the pedal to dictate where the red LED light goes to whichever semitone option. There is also an octaver in this pedal too which very cool indeed.

Of course for people who gig there is the money saving perk too and also very convenient for not having to switch between songs as long as its a standard key and drop type tuning. For open tunings etc you'll have to figet with more than one string as this is a polyphonic type effect pedal,

Its easy to use with no noticable latency issues AT ALL since I got it but I haven't played anything passed the 4th semitone. Drop A is as far I'll go but the only bad thing about this pedal which is understandable for this kind of early technology is a noticable deterioration in sound clarity when you get to about 4 semitone onwards. Especially starting at the 5th semitone for people wondering depending on how low they get to in their style of music. Another thing to note is I'm using a budget solid state amplifier worth less than 200 euro so a lot of other amplifiers may be able to handle it better at the lower semitone settings.

I bought this pedal in order to mitigate the want/need to try out an 8-string guitar, as this is much more affordable and is easily the best-sounding polyphonic pitch shifter pedal on the market, out of all the videos i have watched on Youtube.
I also wanted to use to emulate a bass guitar, as that is also costly and takes up room i don't necessarily have.

I just got it and tried it out and i quite like it! The tracking is very smooth and responsive, although i do hear more artifacts when playing chords then i did on the reviews i watched online, but it happens more with chords that are dissonant or out of tune.

I noticed that when i hear the acoustic string noise of my guitar while playing with the drop tuning on, it can sound pretty weird, but the human ear is that sensitive that even when the faintest sound is out of tune we definitely hear it. Playing louder or through headphones eliminates this problems of course!

I'm just disappointed that there are more artifacts the lower the note being played, both by shifting the pitch further down and by playing lower notes on the guitar even as less drastic settings.

I feel like chances are, if you're here you're already quite dead set on its purpose. It's a staple for so many modern bands and artists for very good reason. Extremely convenient, and as evidenced by the many demos on youtube the sound quality is great.
I'll just skip to the cons I've experienced using this. Intuitively the lower you go, the quality drops, but it's negligible imo, and even less so in a full mix/live setting. This effect is also more pronounced if your guitar is already in a lower tuning. It is more noticeable in chords than in single notes. Additionally, it seems to affect the sustain of palm muted chords. If you use the octave function, you may start to notice some artefacting/aliasing, for my lack of better terms. Some have mentioned latency, but I've yet to face any issues in that regard.
That's about it, the problems are hardly notable, and it does literally everything else perfectly. If I ever lose this a thousand times, I would replace it a thousand times over.

Having owned a few pitch sifters over the last years (many years) I was a little bit dubious on the quality of the pitch shift and expected it to be a bit glitchy. However, this unit maintains a clear sound and digital-sounding-free (well at least to about 4 or 5 semitones. Lower does start to sound a bit weird, but I never go that low. So for drop E flat or drop D (or even C at a push) it sounds great in both clean or in high gain. Actually in high gain no-one would have the slightest clue that your sound was being dropped digitally.
Actually more than just lazy, it is actually it has a permanent place on my pedal board, as it is just so damn easy to move to a drop key with out having to tune the whole guitar again and possible adjust the truss rod. I have never used the momentary function, I just keep it set at the desired drop. The display is quite nice that it is not just a rotary knob with the text around the knob there is an LED for each semitone drop, do a super clear indication of of the drop setting you have selected. This pedal is also very useful for a clean octave drop. Really can't fault it.