Original ideas in the world of guitar are pretty hard to come by these days. Guitarists are a conservative bunch – innovations tend to go unnoticed, and new ideas get panned as fads.
It makes a certain amount of sense – the guitar is a wonderful instrument even without much between it and your ears. Plugging straight into a good amp is enough of an experience to make most people wanna give up their day jobs. But while that’s where most of us start, anyone who’s played a long time knows that half the fun is finding all the OTHER stuff you can do with it.
Enter the Casio Dimension Shifter ($299.99 street).
I’ve played the guitar for 30 years as of 2026, and as the Gear God, 12 of those years have been trying every piece of guitar-related gear that manufacturers can throw at me. And there’s been plenty of good stuff – but until now, none that made me laugh out loud with glee the first time I tried it.
So what is it? It’s literally nothing more than an expression controller that operates like a B-bender. Just like the expression pedal on your board you might use to control some parameters in your modeler, all it does is send expression information. The difference is that it attaches to your strap, and rather that operating it with your foot, you pull down on the guitar.
When I saw it at NAMM this year, I was stunned. It’s such a simple idea that I can’t believe no one thought of it before. The guitar is one of the most expressive instruments that exists – and that’s even without whammy bars and slides, volume pedals and knobs, B- and G-benders, Sustainiac pickups or Ebows. But even all of that can be a bit limited – what if you wanted to have realtime control over the expression of effects, without being at your pedalboard?
The real name of the game here is fun – sure, you can use an expression pedal to do pretty much the same thing, but it just isn’t as much fun. The ability to control an effect right on the guitar itself without it interrupting your playing makes for a way more seamless and enjoyable experience.
When testing the device, I used it for a few different basic effects – pitch/whammy, reverb, and delay. I mostly used it with modeler plugins in my computer, but because of how it’s designed, it’s actually easier to use it with analog effects. Setting it to a +1 or +2 octave shift gives instant Tom Morello vibes, and combining that with the mix control on a shimmer reverb sent me blasting into space.
The setup is pretty simple – there’s a battery-powered wireless transmitter that goes between your strap and your guitar, which sends signal to the receiver via Bluetooth, and then a TRS cable goes from the receiver to the expression input of the device you want to control. In order to control effects in the computer, I also needed a USB MIDI device (in my case a Nektar Pacer) to convert it to a digital signal that the modeler can use. I happened to already have this, but if you’re intending to use the Dimension Shifter to control effects in your computer you’ll need something with this function.
I was a little skeptical of the Bluetooth connection, but it connected immediately and worked with no noticeable latency (the specs list it at 20ms, which is negligible at worst, and I didn’t feel any).
There are several ways to adjust how the Dimension Shifter feels and operates. There’s a tension adjustment that changes how tight the spring mechanism feels (which makes it easier or harder to pull down on), a Minimum Value knob on the receiver so you can customize what values get sent, an Invert button on the transmitter that allows you to invert the value of the expression information being sent (for example, if you’re using it to pitch your signal up an octave, it would go down instead), and a Hold control (that’s what the footswitch does AND there’s a button on the strap unit, in case you’re not at your board) to freeze the effect at any level. There’s also a Switch mode that allows you to turn an effect on and off rather than sending continuous expression control.
All of this adds massive functionality (emphasis on the fun) to the device, and it really takes no time to figure out what settings are gonna work best for you.
I found myself excited to try it on different effects because it opened doors I never considered exploring before. The ability to have that expression without being locked down to my pedalboard to use it has me thinking of a hundred different ways I can use it to play with controls in real time, and for the first time in a long time, I’m having fun like a kid while playing guitar.
You can get your own Dimension Shifter and shift yourself to a dimension of pure joy for $299.99 right here.
