DigiTech began in 1984 as the digital-effects division of DOD Electronics, a Salt Lake City pedal maker David Oreste DiFrancesco and John Johnson had founded a decade earlier, and the two brands have stayed closely tied ever since. The Whammy, launched in 1989, was the first mass-market digital pitch-shifter pedal and remains one of the most recognisable effects in guitar history, still built today largely on the same idea. Harman International owned both DOD and DigiTech from the early 1990s until Samsung's 2018 acquisition of Harman led to the engineering team being let go; Cortek, the parent company of Cort Guitars, bought both brands in 2022 and has kept them running. New Whammy variants and looper updates are what we follow most. Here's what we've written.
DOD and Morley team up for the Wah-ocTo-Fuzz ("WTF") pedal, blending 80s glitch octave, 70s fuzz, and classic optical wah into one wild 3-in-1 box. Out Now!
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Cortek, the parent company of Cort Guitars. DigiTech is the brand name of DOD Electronics, an American manufacturer founded in 1974 by David Oreste DiFrancesco; the business went defunct in 2008 and was revived in 2013 under its current ownership.
A pitch-shifting pedal controlled by a treadle, which lets you bend a note or a whole chord by a set interval with your foot. It has been called one of the most significant innovations in pedal technology, and it is the product the brand is defined by.
A polyphonic pitch shifter that drops your entire tuning by up to a full octave without retuning the guitar. It solves a specific live problem — playing songs in different tunings without a second instrument or a break between them.
They are the same company. DOD Electronics makes both, with DOD historically the analogue stompbox line and DigiTech the digital and multi-effects side. Both names are in current use, so a DOD pedal and a DigiTech pedal can come from the same building.
