“Hands free hammer-ons”: DigiTech’s HammerOn pedal is a 7-in-1 pitch-shifting monster that lets you play the impossible

NAMM 2025: DigiTech's 2022 takeover by Cort owner Cor-Tek seems to have bolstered the company, enabling it to take its experimental essence even further. With DigiTech already delivering the boundary-pushing MonoNeon Whammy this NAMM, it’s now continuing to push the envelope with the brand-new DigiTech HammerOn – a “hands-free, hammer-ons” pedal.

“At DigiTech, we have always been intrigued with incorporating natural guitar playing techniques with guitar effects,” comments DigiTech.

“Guitar players know hammer-on and pull-off guitar playing techniques have a different, more subtle and expressive feel. We wanted to extend this concept of adding additional notes to include foot control that can work in conjunction with your hands and fingers to multiply the options for creativity and increase the range of notes beyond the reach of your fingers.”

At first glance, the HammerOn appears to be a quasi-hybrid of the Drop – which allows players to drop their tuning from one semitone to a full octave – and the Ricochet, DigiTech's stompbox Whammy. However, it takes things even further, as it’s loaded with multiple effects, or as DigiTech puts it, “seven pedals in one.”

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To start, each of the HammerOn's Pitch 1 and Pitch 2 footswitches can be assigned an interval to which the pedal transposes once the respective footswitch is pressed and held. There are 27 pitches to choose from, ranging from two octaves down to two octaves up, and various intervals in between.

But this is just mode one of the pedal's seven operational modes. The second mode, Hammer-on with Trill, turns a single switch press into multiple rapid-fire pitch shifts, with speed adjustable via the Select knob.

The third mode, Harmony-on, blends the dry guitar signal with the pitch-shifted signal to create harmonies based on the selected interval. In Impossible mode, pressing the Pitch 2 footswitch gives you hammer-on pitch shifts that alternate between two selectable pitch amounts.

Moving on to the fifth mode – Drop/Capo Sequence – which, as the name implies, enables players to step through alternative drop/capo tunings or programmable pitch-shifted note sequences. Sequences are further explored with the Sequence with Trill mode, an automatic riff sequencer.

The seventh and final mode, the Sequence with Dry+ and Trill, might be the most intriguing, as the sequence is combined with the trill effect and dry signal to produce what DigiTech calls an “automatic techno guitar sequencer.”

Priced at $279.99, it is now available at all DigiTech partner retailers. Now, if only DigiTech could hurry up and release a demo video!