Strymon is one of the most important names in pedals and has achieved a fan base that fervently believes in its products. With the best of analog and digital, Strymon produces digitally controlled pedals that offer more routing, presets and configurability than anyone.
They rose to fame with the success of their BigSky, TimeLine and Mobius pedals, before branching out into more specific sounds with such as the Iridum amp modeler and impulse response pedal, compressor and voice boost. dual Compadre, and more recently, the multidimensional Zelzah phaser.
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What makes Strymon unique are not only its pedals with super powerful DSP processing using digitally controlled chips, but its attention to detail when recreating more analog sounds. While they are mostly digital pedals, Strymon continues to offer sounds that slide easily into the most existing analog pedal chains. They’re a company at the forefront of the game, so who’s the tails of the coat you’re chasing when you’re a market leader? Yours, of course!
Strymon recently unveiled its Next Generation pedal series, invigorating six classical pedals (and sounds totally necessary for all guitarists), all housed in sizes more suitable for pedals. The Next Generation series includes revised versions of blueSky, Deco, DIG, El Capistan, Flint and Lex Rotary. While pedaling sounds like BigSky, Timeline, and Mobius are massive, so are their footprints, and as digital processing grows, the size of their processors shrinks, allowing them to become more and more popular. small.
Through the six Next Generation pedals, Strymon now offers TRS MIDI / Expression for expressive control of parameters. This 1⁄4 “socket can be used for expression, or using a MIDI interface (such as the Strymon Conduit), you can connect to other MIDI controllers using standard MIDI cables. If you want to be super creative, you can connect it directly to your DAW to take your MIDI integration a step further, and Strymon has taken it to another level and turned some of the control jars used to control effects into usable MIDI encoders, so that everything can be synchronized to one master to ensure optimal digital integration.The Next Generation series also includes USB-C which can give and take MIDI information if you want to use the MIDI TRS jack for something else!
The Strymon Next Generation pedal inputs have been upgraded to JFET transistors, some of the best on the market to handle the Hi-Z signal of the guitar and bass and ensure that the converters inside the pedal receive an optimal and healthy signal. The pedal inputs also now include a mono / stereo switch, which is not a new feature in itself, but yes the ease of access of the switch to the outside! All of these features are many, but Strymon hasn’t stopped there. Each of the six pedals individually is new and overhauled!
blue sky
The blueSky is Strymon’s flagship reverberator. Bright space down to short, crisp rooms, blueSky could do it all, but blueSky Next Generation can do it all and more. Reverbs are one thing, but the addition of a dedicated glossy button, a modification switch, and a new spring reverberation algorithm allows you to create immersive, modulating, or elastic sounds respectively.
Modulation can give a lot of depth to the reverb, especially when mixed subtly, and massive updates in this area are a welcome addition to the blueSky.