DigiTech HarmonyMan

The Digitech Harmony Man pedal lets you produce harmonies quickly with its intelligent technology. The HarmonyMan has four types of pitch-shifting effects: triad-centered (major or minor scale with three-part root, third and fifth voicings, as well as inversions), scalic (key harmonies), fixed (a constant chromatic interval such as a fifth up or an octave down) and detune (for natural chorusing effects). Individual knobs for each of the two pitch-shifted voices let you select the type of harmony you’d like, with the settings displayed on a simple but effective alphanumeric LED display. A Harmony Key display indicates which key is selected and doubles as a note indicator for the built-in chromatic tuner. The musIQ button engages the automatic-scale/key-sensing function, and the store key allows you to save up to four harmony presets. This pedal would be perfect if it had individual outputs for each harmony. The voice 1 and voice 2 knobs let you pick what two harmonies you want the pedal to do.

UTILIZATION

This pedal would be pretty complicated if it wasnt for the intelligent key finding feature. The pedal follows the chords you play before you turn on the harmony feature to figure out what key you are in. Then it uses the type of harmony you selected to figure out what harmony is appropriate this what key you are playing. The pedal works great as long as it can clearly hear what key you are playing in. You have to feed the pedal a clean guitar signal for it to work its best. The pedal has a return jack for you to work your dirty sounds in. The built in tuner is a nice feature as you want to be in tune when it harmonies your guitar because it will harmonize an out of tune guitar perfectly out of tune also.

SOUND QUALITY

With the octave up settings it is best that you play in the mid range of your guitar. If you play too high up with the octave up harmony you will be annoying your dog. The octave up sounds a lot better than most pedals that go an octave up. It still sounds good as it gets beyond your range of hearing. 3 part harmonies with a harmony up and a harmony down produce a cool electric organ like tone. The effect’s tracking is exceptionally fast and accurate. If really sounds like there is another guitar player playing with you when it is working perfectly. When you start using two different intervals it starts to sound unnatural. Keeping the settings simple is best to keeping the sound good.

OVERALL OPINION

This is a good simple harmonizer but like all harmonizers it can only stick to a certain interval. If you are writing harmony guitar lines you are probably smart enough to write them with moving intervals to get different textures. This is something that this pedal cannot replicate easily. If you are just looking to play simple harmonies the Harmony Man may be cheaper than another guitar player.