Alternate tunings

What's the difference between a pitch shifter pedal and an octave pedal? Can i use these instead of having to retune my guitar for alternate tunings ?

an octave pedal will lower the pitch by one octave. This is more than one whole step on the guitar...this is not like dropping down one tone.

in my experience with pitch shifters and octavers, I have yet to find one that sounds natural... and the lower you drop, the more unnatural it sounds. I wouldn't use it in place of having to retune, but I suppose that you could if you need to, such as you have half the song in drop D and the other half in drop C or something like that... an octaver drops you one octave, which is 12 half-steps, making your guitar sound more like a bass. and a pitch shifter will raise and lower you only a few half steps at a time.

Yeah, every pitch shifting pedal I've tried just robs the tone. It sounds really "digital" to my ears, which I hate.

And no, these types of pedals are not used for alternate tunings...

you cannot program the pedal to go into say Open G or anything like that. Just look at the spec sheet and the BOSS super shifter...on the pedal it has pretty much everything it does and there are even some sound clips