This amazing digital whammy bar won’t mess with your guitar’s tunings

Guitar enthusiasts know that whammy bars are a lot of fun to use, but often a real pain to maintain. Unless your axe is equipped with some extra (read: pricey) bells and whistles, heavy usage of solo dives and vibratos can often result in tuning problems requiring consistent adjustments and readjustments between usages. The same can also often be said of capos, but a new add-on from FomoFx looks to solve all those problems once and for all.

The Virtual Jeff Pro is the newest in the company’s line of digital whammy bar accessories, allowing guitar players to employ all the traditional mount’s vibrato capabilities alongside alternative capo tunings via an easy-to-install adhesive mount and foot pedal. A new video of the Virtual Jeff Pro in action shows just how seamless the device can be and how good it is at managing sound. Unfortunately, the tuning simplicity doesn’t come for cheap: musicians can currently snag the Pro kit for $499. Ouch.

More useful than other recent pedal offerings — Although expensive, the Virtual Jeff Pro certainly appears to be a much better addition to your guitar effects arsenal than, say, a pedal that literally does absolutely nothing at all. While no longer available (we can’t for the life of us imagine why), the Placebo Pedal went for just $99, with an additional $25 providing buyers with the schematics to convert the thing into an actual, far-more-useful distortion effects pedal.

Both trump the other guitar pedal story this year — Of course, we’d take a completely useless, hundred-dollar gag guitar gift over the other time pedals made the news this year — that time when QAnon and MAGA cultists began circulating a supposed 5G vaccine conspiracy schematic that turned out to actually be the circuitry chart for a guitar accessory. Amusing? Yes, we’re laughing, too — how terrifying that people can fall so easily for something so easily disproven. But on we go, and none of that is the Virtual Jeff Pro’s fault.