Strymon
The Strymon Blue Sky Reverberator features multi-function
knobs and the ability to toggle between two sounds with the
Favorite switch. |
Strymon effects is the brainchild of founder
Terry Burton, but the Westlake Village,
California, company runs on the collective
power of an engineering brain trust—a
gang of self-declared “left-brain artists”—
that, in some ways, represents a shift
toward acceptance of digital in the boutique
marketplace. Because, unlike many
boutique pedal houses, Strymon enthusiastically
embraces digital signal processing
(DSP) technology. While scorned by some
analog purists, DSP enables Strymon to
create some of the most authentic vintage
sounds available to guitarists.
Strymon’s DSP pedals—the Blue Sky
Reverberator, the Orbit Flanger, the Ola
Chorus & Vibrato, and the Brigadier Delay
(all reviewed in the July 2010 issue of PG)—
have drawn raves for their approximations
of analog sounds. And the company’s latest
pedal, the El Capistan (see the review on p.
182), may be the most refined realization of
Strymon’s aspirations—a processing powerhouse
in a pedal that can simulate the fuzzy
warmth, irregularities, and imperfections of
tape delay and transport the user to truly
bizarre sonic realms that only complex digital
processing makes possible.
Strymon’s Dave Fruehling holds the title of
Firmware Architect Genius.
Strymon’s analog engineer, Gregg Stock, explores old-school ways with a
heavily modified, Floyd Rose-equipped Gibson Explorer.
Strymon founder Terry Burton with an SG and a Brigadier delay (foreground).
Pete Celi brainstorms DSP algorithms that generate analog sounds. |
Burton was just a teenager when he caught
the pedal bug. And like most builders, he
was blown away by the sound of the analog
classics—in his case, a Thomas Organ-built
Crybaby wah and an A/DA flanger that
would ultimately inspire the Strymon Orbit.
“My uncle let me borrow his A/DA
Flanger, Crybaby, and a Yamaha SPX90,
and I abused the privilege by taking
everything apart and reassembling it at
least 20 times in an attempt to find out
how things worked,” explains Burton. “I’m
currently still ‘borrowing’ the A/DA and
the Crybaby after many years.”
Burton’s abuse of the Yamaha SPX90 may
have opened his mind to the potential
of digital circuits as he was falling in
love with analog sounds, but he was also
inspired by some distinctly contemporary
sounds overlooked by many pedal
hounds: Andy Summers’ modulation and
delay on Police records, the modulation
sounds achieved by the Pretenders and
the Cure, and the aggressive guitar-straight-
into-amp tones of Fugazi. That
wide perspective on musical history—and
the open-mindedness about what defines
a great tone or great record—is a big
part of the Strymon design mindset.
“Obviously, delay, reverb and modulation
all existed before we started making our
own. Sometimes we try to take existing
effects into uncharted territory and sometimes
we are trying to solve a specific
set of problems that existed in analog circuits,”
says Burton.
“When we developed the Brigadier Delay,
we knew that the nicer, high-voltage analog
bucket-brigade chips were nearly impossible
to get and that all analog delays
suffered from certain problems like poor
signal-to-noise ratios, distortion, and limited
headroom. Of course, these ‘problems’ are
part of what make analog delays cool,”
Burton admits. “So we implemented discrete
bucket brigade stages in DSP and
added a control for ‘bucket loss.’ That
single control lets you have a cleaner analog
delay than has ever existed before or a
very dirty and noisy one. With El Capistan,
the goal was to capture all of the electrical
and mechanical nuances that make classic
tape delays sound the way they do—and
put that technology in a small form factor
without the maintenance nightmares that
plague traditional tape delays.”
Burton and his team understand why players
treasure analog sounds. But unlike many
players who have chosen sides along the
digital-analog divide, Burton sees digital
as a way to look backward and forward
simultaneously. “I think the analog fixation
that many players have is not unfounded,”
Burton says. “And there certainly have
been many digital products released over
the years that have failed to deliver the
goods. We are keenly aware of this when
undertaking our DSP designs. But if we’re
successful in achieving our design goals,
the technology becomes irrelevant. What
we know and love is making hardware, and
we want our hardware to be not only great
sounding, but also fun and satisfying to use.
Traditionalist or not, if someone sits down
in front of a pedal and that pedal inspires
them musically, then it’s a successful design.
My hope is that we’re always using the
authentic sounds as a foundation and building
from there. In addition to making things
that conjure the days of old, we also want
to create sounds that haven’t even existed
before. And, we’ve got lots of projects
cooking in our labs.”
strymon.net