It does it job.

Pitch shifting in real time requires a lot of processing power. I say this because once you go down, tone gets a little bit worse. This pedal is nice for gigging and rehearsing, because that means less time to change tunings especially if you have a floyd rose style bridge. Of course this pedal is unthinkable for recording

The difference in tone is quite minimal, to be honest, and it handles bends very well, something that the Boss poly shifter struggles with. For distorted tones, it is ver good, but for cleaner guitar, be careful. one-4 semitones is fine, but lower than that, the difference is quite noticeable. The octave is meh.

Good for what it does, but not perfect

So my buddies and I are thinking of starting a band - great!

But it's going to be likely stoner doom. ...I don't downtune my guitars - at all. I don't really like having specific strings for specific tunings and neck adjustments and all that. So I needed a solution.

Enter the Digitech Drop. This thing was near impossible to find. Local shops didn't carry it, and I eventually got it used for a reasonable price.

Build quality is good. Controls are great. If I had one complaint, it is the fact that it doesn't really play nice with my Jazzmaster that well. But that is more of an annoyance than a glaring flaw.

Preferred Settings + Usage:

A must have for cover bands

It does the job better than anything on the market. It's built like a tank, what's not to love? The control layout is so dead simple. Only real gripe is that the pedal can get wonky past 5 or 6 steps down, but that's expected I suppose.

It's the best available, but that bar is pretty low

Right off the bat, I should say the Drop pedal performed much better than the EHX Pitch Fork, the most similar pedal I could find to compare it to. The Pitch Fork was rife with audio artifacts, adding weird metallic high end and making my entire guitar signal sound like a poorly compressed mp3 file. The Drop, by comparison, is quite clean and free of strange artifacts.

Unfortunately, the biggest issue with it is that it removes quite a lot of treble from your signal, especially the lower you drop tune down. At even three semitones down, my guitar sounds dull and lifeless. If you have a pedal later on in the chain that has EQ adjustments, you can sometimes compensate by boosting the highs later on -- and it's definitely less noticeable going into a heavy distortion than it is clean -- but it's by far the most irritating down side of this pedal.

If you can live with the loss of brightness, everything else about this actually works quite well. The tracking is great, none of the glitchiness I've run into with some octave pedals. The build quality is good, and ease-of-use couldn't be better: one knob, one switch, and then a momentary mode that is fun to mess with but I haven't used much in real life.

It's staying on my board for now, if only because the convenience of the thing is hard to argue with. When a song gets thrown at you in Eb or F# or some key that is * almost * a convenient guitar key, rather than re-voicing all the riffs and losing all your open strings, you smash this guy on and play in E or G voicings to your heart's content. Also, throwing your standard tuned guitar down to C-standard and shredding some metal riffs is fun every time.

Amazing

Purchased this so I wasn't frequently changing tunings, and it has saved the day flawlessly. I can confidently go from E standard down to C standard, and also put it in drop A# with no tracking issues

From Gear Setup

Saves me carting another bass

I only need to detune half a step-down, so this pedal does the job. Maybe lower driving is worse, but frankly, I will never have a problem if it does. However, the tone is compromised so it's a poor solution.

Compared to the Helix’s Simple Pitch, the drip has a slower response and introduces more artefacts to the sound. Because of that I always prefer the simple pitch. However, i keep the drop on my backup board as it works, but needs a serious update.

From Gear Setup

what other options do you have?

It'll destroy the top end of your tone. I get it, pitch shifting in real time is tricky.

I use this because it has less latency than the pitch shifter built in to the Kemper. It's not great, it's fine. Really nice for rehearsal, but I'll always take an alternate guitar on stage.

From Gear Setup

Does the job, great octave tone

It definitely changes the tone when tuning down, but it's good to use on a gig for playing 1 or 2 songs that have crazy tunings without wasting time tuning down or changing guitars. The octave sounds great though

Must have for me

Wish I could have got one years ago, amazing piece of tech that made my life a lot easier Just be sure to play loud enough to prevent you from hearing the strings.

It drops your tuning great but doesn't replace the beefy strings you would use for a lower tuning.

Great for jamming, rehearsals live use without constantly switching guitars or retuning.

Warning: If your wife knows about this pedal then you have no more excuses for buying more guitars.

From Gear Setup

Highly recommend.

At any level of guitar, especially in metal, being able to tune your guitar down at will is an incredible luxury that I didn't know I needed.