5 Boutique Stompbox Builders You Should Know
Strymon
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.
“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.” —Strymon founder Terry Burton
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.
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.
“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 contempo-
rary 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 some-
times we are trying to solve a specific
Above: The Strymon Blue Sky Reverberator features multi-function knobs and the ability to toggle between two sounds with the Favorite switch. Right: Strymon’s Dave Fruehling holds the title of Firmware Architect Genius.
Burton was just a teenager when he caught
the pedal bug. And like most builders, he
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