NAMM 2025: This one is not for the faint-hearted. It’s a DigiTech Whammy pedal, co-designed by the bass guitar genius and Day-Glo polymath MonoNeon, aka Dywane Eric Thomas Jr – and it has some of the wildest treadle-activated pitch-shifting you will ever hear.
It is not like the DigiTech Whammy was ever a utilitarian effect, the always-on tone sweetener; it has always been radical, giving players such as Tom Morello and the late Dimebag Darrell the capacity to digitally manipulate notes into a squawk that was more animal kingdom than pedalboard.
But MonoNeon and the DigiTech R&D team have just taken the concept to a new extreme, taking the fifth-gen Whammy and “turning it on its head”. Mono Neon is best known as a bass guitar player but this works just as well on electric guitar. Sonic extremists, read on.
The first thing you will notice is the paint job. The red enclosure is now high-viz yellow and orange, and under UV black lights it lights up green. This radioactive aesthetic foreshadows the sounds to come, with the highlight of Mono Neon’s artist spec Whammy unquestionably the Hypersonic mode, which allows you to raise the pitch by up to three octaves.
Just imagine the possibilities. What if this had been around in ’93 when Pantera were tracking Far Beyond Driven; what would Becoming have sounded like if Dimebag had this on his ‘board?
But there’s more than this. In keeping with the Whammy pedal family, you have all manner of ways of expressing yourself with pitch-shifting weirdness, and on-point pitch tracking. There are two modes, Classic and Chords.
Turn the switch to Classic and it runs the original Whammy algorithm which works a treat on single-notes. Set it to Chords and you can start pitch-shifting several notes at once.
There are all-new octaver blend voicings plus all your regular harmony settings. You have got 10 Whammy settings to play with. There is a MIDI connection.
And despite all these new sounds, it has the same user-friendly design as the regular lineup, with a rotary selector dial, the built-in treadle, and the footswitch to engage/bypass. Only this time you might have to wear shades when operating it.
Inside the box you will find a power supply, a pair of stickers for your guitar case, and a customising kit including permanent marker, neon yellow and neon orange gaffer’s tape.
Available now, the MonoNeon Whammy is priced £269/$349. See DigiTech for more details.
