RatingsPros:Excellent sounds ranging from conventional to otherworldly. Cons: It’s big. Slight learning curve if you want to really get the most out of the pedal. Street: $349 Seymour Duncan Silver Lake seymourduncan.com | Tones:  Ease of Use:  Build/Design:  Value: |
Seymour Duncan is known best as a pickup titan. But unless you’ve been really tuned out to news from the pedal sphere, you’re probably aware that his company has built a bunch of excellent effects in recent years. And in the wake of their superb Andromeda Dynamic Delay, they’ve released the Silver Lake, a programmable reverb workstation with dynamic expression capabilities.
Echo Park
The Silver Lake features eight preset reverb types: room, hall, plate, spring, shimmer, gated, swell, and delay/verb. But as its feature-packed control panel suggests, Silver Lake is really about how you can manipulate those eight voices. There are knobs for mix, pre-delay, decay, grit, damp, function, and tweak (which works in conjunction with the function knob to modify modulation depth, modulation rate, and high- and low-pass filtering).
There are also mini buttons for trails mode, and a small display screen with two mini-buttons: bank and preset. A micro USB jack on the side lets you update the firmware as needed. The Silver Lake’s dynamic expression section has a threshold knob and mini buttons for hard/soft/off and mix/mod/damp, which we’ll explain later. Yeah—there’s a lot of ways to shape Silver Lake’s signal flow.
As you might guess, given its complexity, the Silver Lake relies on presets to manage the many reverb colors you’ll create. The 128 presets can be organized as 32 banks of four presets. The presets footswitch serves several functions. Press it once and you go to the next preset in a bank. Hold it down until the bank of LED lights is solid, then tap quickly, and it goes up to the next bank. To go backwards in banks, you just keep the footswitch depressed.
If you just need basic reverbs, the Silver Lake offers excellent, studio-quality sounds. But that would be a massive underutilization of the Silver Lake’s capabilities. Shimmer delay adds octave-up content to the reverbed signal. Using it with a mix that slightly favored the effected signal, I generated interstellar organ-like sounds for chords and harp-like timbres for scalar passages. The grit control enabled me to effectively adjust the upper octave blend. There’s a lot of sonic ground to explore between zero effect and the seasick wobbliness you get when the knob is maxed, and the range (and subtler possibilities) are welcome given how bold some of the effects can be.
Express Yourself
While the Silver Lake’s basic sounds are solid, the pedal is really distinguished by its dynamic expression controls. Choosing “hard” or “soft” regulates how the pedal responds to your picking. In soft mode, quiet picking foregrounds the effect, while harder picking places the dry signal out in front. In hard mode, the opposite applies. Meanwhile the dynamic response can be assigned to specific parameters including mix, damp, or modulation. The threshold knob also lights up brighter depending on how much of the selected parameter is being mixed in, giving clear visual response to your playing.
The Silver Lake’s dynamic response can have unexpected and musically complex results. In the “mod room” preset, I set the dynamic expression threshold knob at noon and set it up for soft response and a variable mix (meaning soft picking would render the reverb effect more present). This inspired me to play call-and-response type phrases where I played loud, dry single-note figures against softly played chords blooming with reverb overtones. When I reversed the dynamic expression setting to hard, I played single-note passages softly—generating almost no effect—and built to a crescendo of double stops and chords swimming in a wash of reverberation. Such phrasing is unusual for me. But the Silver Lake pushed me to explore beyond my own creative boundaries.
The Verdict
The Silver Lake is capable of many beautiful sounding reverbs—from familiar to fantastic. But the magic of this pedal lies in its capacity for real-time interaction with a player’s dynamics. In this capacity, the Silver Lake almost becomes a unique instrument—one that, in the hands of a creative musician, could lead to unusual and original sounds.
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Reverend Vernon Reid Totem Series Electric Guitar - Shaman
Silos features six presets, tap tempo, one full second of delay time, and three voices—two of which are styled after bucket-brigade and tape-delay sounds. In the $150 price category, it’s not unusual for a digital delay to leave some number of those functions out. And spending the same money on a true-analog alternative usually means warm, enveloping sounds but limited functionality and delay time. Silos, improbably perhaps, offers a very elegant solution to this can’t-have-it-all dilemma in a U.S.-made effect.
A More Complete Cobbling Together
Silos’ utility is bolstered by a very unintimidating control set, which is streamlined and approachable. Three of those controls are dedicated to the same mix, time, and repeats controls you see on any delay. But saving a preset to one of the six spots on the rotary preset dial is as easy as holding the green/red illuminated button just below the mix and preset knobs. And you certainly won’t get lost in the weeds if you move to the 3-position toggle, which switches between a clear “digital” voice, darker “analog” voice, and a “tape” voice which is darker still.
“The three voices offer discernibly different response to gain devices.”
One might suspect that a tone control for the repeats offers similar functionality as the voice toggle switch. But while it’s true that the most obvious audible differences between digital, BBD, and tape delays are apparent in the relative fidelity and darkness of their echoes, the Silos’ three voices behave differently in ways that are more complex than lighter or duskier tonality. For instance, the digital voice will never exhibit runaway oscillation, even at maximum mix and repeat settings. Instead, repeats fade out after about six seconds (at the fastest time settings) or create sleepy layers of slow-decaying repeats that enhance detail in complex, sprawling, loop-like melodic phrases. The analog voice and tape voice, on the other hand, will happily feed back to psychotic extremes. Both also offer satisfying sensitivity to real-time, on-the-fly adjustments. For example, I was tickled with how I could generate Apocalypse Now helicopter-chop effects and fade them in and out of prominence as if they were approaching or receding in proximity—an effect made easier still if you assign an expression pedal to the mix control. This kind of interactivity is what makes analog machines like the Echoplex, Space Echo, and Memory Man transcend mere delay status, and the sensitivity and just-right resistance make the process of manipulating repeats endlessly engaging.
Doesn't Flinch at Filth
EarthQuaker makes a point of highlighting the Silos’ affinity for dirty and distorted sounds. I did not notice that it behaved light-years better than other delays in this regard. But the three voices most definitely offer discernibly different responses to gain devices. The super-clear first repeat in the digital mode lends clarity and melodic focus, even to hectic, unpredictable, fractured fuzzes. The analog voice, which EQD says is inspired by the tone makeup of a 1980s-vintage, Japan-made KMD bucket brigade echo, handles fuzz forgivingly inasmuch as its repeats fade warmly and evenly, but the strong midrange also keeps many overtones present as the echoes fade. The tape voice, which uses aMaestro Echoplex as its sonic inspiration, is distinctly dirtier and creates more nebulous undercurrents in the repeats. If you want to retain clarity in more melodic settings, it will create a warm glow around repeats at conservative levels. Push it, and it will summon thick, sometimes droning haze that makes a great backdrop for slower, simpler, and hooky psychedelic riffs.
In clean applications, this decay and tone profile lend the tape setting a spooky, foggy aura that suggests the cold vastness of outer space. The analog voice often displays an authentic BBD clickiness in clean repeats that’s sweet for underscoring rhythmic patterns, while the digital voice’s pronounced regularity adds a clockwork quality that supports more up-tempo, driving, electronic rhythms.
The Verdict
Silos’ combination of features seems like a very obvious and appealing one. But bringing it all together at just less than 150 bucks represents a smart, adept threading of the cost/feature needle.
EarthQuaker Devices Silos Multi-generational Time Reflection Delay Pedal
