Solar Guitars is the latest firm to enter the hotly contested pitch-shifting market with the Chug Capo, a no-nonsense stompbox being billed as “a digital bi-directional capo” that is set to go toe to toe with the likes of Boss and DigiTech.
The chrome pedal shifts up and down by one octave in semitone increments, has a bright display, and two key selling points.
The first is the promise of low latency performance – weighing in roughly half its rival's – so that “fast tempo right-hand picking and chugging won’t give the feel of your playing dragging.”
Beyond that, Solar says the “sonic integrity” of a player’s tone will not be harmed when shifting the signal. Its voicing has been “meticulously programmed” so that the affected sound the same as an unaltered chord sound.
That’s important for those considering a pitch-shifting pedal as a primarily practical piece of gear. Dropping by, say a whole tone, can help eradicate the need for taking multiple guitars on the road, thus slimming down live rigs.
Elsewhere, the pedal has two modes. Mix offers a “very powerful fast-tracking octave divider,” while a saved preset can be recalled via Fav mode. There’s also the option of plugging in a non-latching switch, which is not included.
Finally, there’s a Mix dial for blending the pitched signal, meaning it can double up as an octave, and a USB-C port on the back for connecting to a computer.
For a good while, the DigiTech Whammy and Drop pedals, alongside Electro Harmonix’s Pitch Fork, were the go-to for on-the-fly transposing. But in recent years, Neural DSP has impressed with the Transpose feature built into its plugins, and Boss did some serious work with its artifact-free XS-1 Poly-Shifter last year. The market has woken up to the need for high-end pitch shifters for bedroom musicians and working guitarists alike.
In certain cases, artifacts have proven a key characteristic of pitch-shifting – it’s why the DigiTech Whammy DT edges out the Boss XS-100 in my opinion – but for pitch-shifting in its purest form, Boss has proven a force to be reckoned with. That means that Solar has to meet a high bar if it is going to stage a successful content.
“This is the fastest and most transparent-sounding pitch shifter to date, especially when it comes to tight rhythm playing, chords, and pinch harmonics,” says firm founder, Ola Englund. These, he adds, “are usually the first things to expose weaknesses in pitch shifters.”
The Chug Capo is priced at $249, which makes it a chunk pricier than the $199 Boss XS-1, which has slightly more features and a wider octave range. The acid test comes down to audio quality alone.
See Solar for more.
