Morpheus has come to the rescue with the DropTune, a pedal designed with one thing in mind: to lower the pitch of your guitar while not sounding so darn fake about it. I’m sure we’ve all tried various pitch-shifting devices one time or another to achieve this. If the weird underwater-sounding digital artefacts don’t kill ya straight away, the latency will. But what do you expect: those pedals are typically designed to shift the pitch downwards to recombine with the original note anyway.

The DropTune doesn’t aim to be a harmonizer with pitch-shifting capabilities. It’s just a pitch-dropping pedal. The DropTune’s design is simple. There are three footswitches: On/Off, Up, and Down. The On/Off switch is also labelled ‘effect’ (see the photos) while the Up switch is also labelled ‘toggle.’ I tested a prototype version that didn’t have these markings. Around the back there’s a guitar in, a line level pot, a line out, a USB port and the 12V DC 500mA power jack. The DropTune allows you to drop the guitar’s pitch up to 3 ½ steps down in ½ step increments (ie: your low E can be changed to Eb, D, Db, C, B, Bb or A) as well as an octave-down setting and an octaver effect which blends the octave-down note with your original one.