Morpheus DropTune Octave Guitar Effects Pedal Guest Review

The following is a guest review of the Morpheus DropTune Octave Guitar Effects Pedal by Mark Grundhoefer (@markgrundhoefer). If you are interested in guest posting, please contact me!

Recently I acquired the Morpheus DropTune pedal and was eager to put it to the test. It’s extremely easy to use and no instructions are necessary. In fact, nothing was in the box other than the pedal and the power supply. Some basic directions are printed on the outside of the box. The tracking of the Morpheus is extremely fast and accurate. As you move down the 7 half steps, I found it to be a little chorusy around the 5th, 6th, and 7th half steps on clean, but when I engaged the overdrive or fuzz on my board, it really growled in those low registers. The first 4 half steps are very clean and precise and were only enhanced more by my gain pedals. It’s not perfect, and sometimes not as natural sounding as you might hope, but it does track extremely well. The octave down, however, is digital and totally unusable. The octaver feature is cool as an effect but still very digital. One feature that would be nice is if you could blend the dry signal for all the steps to create a harmonizer but that’s just wishful thinking.

As far as the uses for the Morpheus go, I am a guitar teacher and I bought the pedal to use in my studio so that I don’t have to detune for many of the songs that my students bring in. A ton of popular artists play half a step down or more and it’s great to have a pedal like this and not have to retune my guitar for each lesson. I think someone in a cover band would get a lot of use out of it as well. When you get on stage with a full band the sometimes digital aspects won’t really be noticed. I’m a bit of a tone freak and wasn’t planning on using this for anything other than teaching. I think most guitarists will find it useful and fun but may not add it to their professional rig. Overall I give it an A-

Mark Grundhoefer is a teacher at the Dave Janssen School of Music in Simi Valley www.davejanssen.com If you are interested in lessons check out the website. Mark also plays guitar for Everything’s On Fire, Los Angeles’ premiere rock band www.everythingsonfire.com (coming soon). Twitter: @markgrundhoefer and @EOFmusic

You can pick up the Morpheus DropTune Octave Guitar Effects Pedal for $199.99 at Musician’s Friend.