If you’ve spent any time with other programmable guitar effectors, you’ll appreciate the Big Sky’s intuitiveness. Strymon knows how to make a potentially aggravating architecture highly navigable. You also get cool features such as assignable spillover, reverb-persist, freeze, and infinite-sustain functions. Among the studio-quality reverbs you’ll find plate, room, spring, and hall machines, as well as intriguing algorithms with names like bloom, cloud, chorale, and magneto. Not to be outdone, Strymon has now revisited the concept that arguably put it on the map: The new Big Sky takes the gorgeousness of the original and blows it, er, sky high with a deeper pedal that still offers intuitive operation for its 12 “reverb machine” algorithms and 100 banks of three nameable presets each. It’s a virtual mad-scientist lab for those who are endlessly fascinated with the possibilities of audio signals bouncing off unseen objects-and then being twisted, warped, chopped, and vaporized. Pedals such as Eventide’s Space and TimeFactor, as well as TC Electronic’s Nova pedals and Flashback X4 Delay, have all collectively blown minds with their depth, sound quality, and bang for the buck. Much has changed on the hi-fi time-based effects scene since then. And the form factor packs a punch, too: Besides a standard bypass switch, the Blue Sky’s ingenious “favorite” footswitch let’s you toggle between two settings-a nice compromise of flexibility and simplicity. It’s relatively compact and modestly appointed with its five knobs. What ambience fans loved/love about the Blue Sky is that its impressive plate, room, and spring simulations (as well as its modulation and shimmer modes) offer fidelity that’s rare in a digital stompbox-especially one that eschews the LED displays and deep-dive menus that are daunting to some of us 6-string simpletons. In fact, I happily plunked down cash for the lush, studio-grade tones of the Blue Sky Reverberator, and it’s been on my fairly modest board ever since. Premier Guitar was among the first to take notice ( we reviewed four of Strymon’s initial offerings in July 2010), and we were immediate fans. When Strymon hit the scene in 2010, word spread that its classic-yet-futuristic-looking pedals adroitly straddled the line between analog simplicity and digital flexibility and power.
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