Strymon Bluesky

I had agonised for the longest time about shelling out for a Strymon. I'm not a professional musician, and playing is little more than a hobby for me. I'd only seen them on YouTube demonstrations, and so I was even more dubious about the spend having not had the opportunity to test the pedal myself.

Initially, I was buying this for the fantastic Shimmer Plate reverb. If you've not heard it, it's a fantastic swelling, room-filling organ-esque effect that melts your ears. If you have heard it, you're probably in love with it. And believe me, it sounds just as good when you manipulate it for yourself.

I was never much of a reverb user - my amp has a basic reverb built-in, and that suited what I needed. I did not have a reverb pedal and I felt that I did not need one. The lure was in the Shimmer Plate reverb. The biggest conflict I faced was: 'Can I justify spending so much on a pedal I only really want one sound from?'

Well, I did it. It had been on my mind for so many months, I had to buy it. As I've said, the Shimmer Plate sound lives up to its expectations. But now that I'd bought a reverb pedal, I decided I had to learn to implement reverb effectively to justify buying such a pedal. I can honestly say I've already learnt so much from this pedal about the different kinds of reverb. This pedal can really do it all. A brilliant selection of core settings (Normal, Modulation and Shimmer) and core variables (Plate, Room and Spring) to start you off, as well as the five adjustable knobs mean you'll be able to tinker around with different sounds and find many new ideas along the way.

I would definitely recommend keeping a pen and paper handy to make a record of all your settings, as, while this pedal does throw out so many useful sounds, you can easily forget where you found what. The pedal offers a favourite mode, meaning you can quickly save at least one sound you like and have it as a go-to. I don't know if you can favourite more than one sound, but that would be a really helpful feature to allow for quick select.

One of my favourite features of this (that is not everyone's cup of tea and thus, is not defaulted) is that by holding down the bypass switch as you supply the pedal with power and it switches to an analog bypass, meaning you reverb trails off as you disengage the effect, rather than an abrupt cut out.

Bought this to pair with a Strymon El Capistan: you know the score... tape delay into gorgeous reverb for that ambient sound.

The Bluesky does not dissapoint and has lots of tones from subtle to over-the-top wettness. It has a loveley (semi-hidden, so RTFM!) tails feature, so that bypassing the pedal does not cut the effect dead, but carries on fading away, especially usefull if you have an epic long reverb running.

There are a fair number of combinations, with different types of reverberation. Modulation is nice, and can add a subtle twist to your sound. The vanilla reverbs sound crystal clear, but of course you can shape the top and bottom end to get a darker tone or ethereal high end only.Everything is just a knob twist away, so no menu diving. Easy.

Overall, there is nothing to dislike. True bypass is there if your inner tone-junkie needs it, but the analog bypass with trails is a winner. I found no issues with tone-suck.
In a lot of cases, unless you are after a specific effect, this pedal can be considered an essential, in the line, set and forget - just gives air and room to your sound; or of course you can get massive long reverb tails that you hone and save as a favourite setting, so you can punch it in when needed.

If you don't need memories and MIDI - but just want the Strymon Reverb Sound, this is brilliant. I love it.

Before I bought this pedal I Already had the Strymon El Capistan tape echo simulator which I consider to be one of the best delay pedals made. My hopes where that the Bluesky would match that quality, and it did! The sound quality of this pedal is second to none. The true stereo (Both stereo in and outs) feature is great and the favourite switch allows you to store a preset making it possible to toggle between two entirely different top class reverbs. This pedal has to optional bypass types. True bypass (no extra components in your signal i your signalpath) and a spillover bypass (leaving the rebverb-trails to die of naturally and not just cut out when the pedal is bypassed). The pedal has analog dry through meaning you keep your original signal intact and it never goes through any A/D D/A converters. The only downside is a part of the features. The so many knobs and parameters to tweak you might end up just playing with the knobs for hours and not really play any guitar. But once you're done tweaking this pedal is one of the best sounding units out there.

This is a great pedal but I found it to have somewhat limited uses in real world playing. Everything about the Bluesky is quality. Easy to use and store your favourite sound with the "favourite" switch. Endless hours can be spent creating different sounds. I had a few "I can't believe that's me!" moments!!

Great pedal, but I'm personally not finding too much use for it myself.