Those looking for more conventional sources of ambience – spring, hall, plate and so forth – will find minds blown when presented with the options and the reality-warping ambience you can dial in here. The Strymon NightSky is not your everyday reverb pedal. There is also a Drive switch to add a little dirt. To have it in a standalone pedal, with knobs to turn plus programmable presets, will have today's seekers of soundscapes all starry-eyed. This kind of quality doesn't come cheap, but reverbs don't get much better than this - a superlative stompbox in every way.Īs those who own a Space or H9 will tell you, the Blackhole reverb sound is not of this Earth. The Glimmer function is switchable and gives the reverb tail's harmonic content a little more more magic– you can use it to add intrigue at either end of the frequency spectrum depending on how bright/dark you want the reverb. Here the Shimmer can be set to a certain musical interval and applied to the input of the reverb core, or for a more sustained effect it can be used on the reverb's core itself. You have low-cut and high-cut filters on-hand to sculpt the reverb's EQ, and the Mod section is comprehensive. In scale mode you have a two-octave range and eight scales to choose from, including major and minor pentatonics, dorian and diminished scales. The pitch shifting on the decay is exceptional and you can take it from a perfectly quantised setting that varies smoothly and continuously over a 2.5 octave pitch range, is quantised into half-step intervals over a two octave range, or you can enter a scale mode that quantises the reverb into scales. The Size/Pitch knob changes the virtual size of reverb's space and the pitch. Simply set the decay length via a knob, and then you are read for some more bespoke twists. Diffuse is for more expansive ambient adventures. Dense is akin to plate reverb – though it gets hectic at high delay times. Sparse offers a sort delay effect when you play staccato, and cleans up nicely with sustained playing. To build a sound from scratch, choose your reverb texture. While we are reviewing the NightSky from the perspective of a guitar player, bear in mind that it is similarly designed to work with synths, which opens up another can of wormholes when it comes to outré sounds. Of course, this being Strymon, and this being a state-of-the-art digital unit, you can access some 300 presets via MIDI. The build is top-quality, with the enclosure a similar size to Strymon's other top-line pedals – the Volante, BigSky, TimeLine etc. Navigating back and forth between presets and the current settings of the pedal is performed via the Favorite footswitch. On a darkened stage (or, to really get into it, under a canopy of stars) these LEDs are nice and bright and let you know what's going on. These light green from 1-8, and amber from 9 to 16. You can access 16 presets via the eight Sequence/Preset buttons. Once you have found something cool, simply save it down as a preset.
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