GEAR OF THE YEAR
DELAY & MODULATION EFFECTS
Expansive, shrinking and repurposed vintage sounds for today’s players
Strymon Cloudburst Ambient Reverb
It may be industry standard, but the Strymon BigSky is a big beast, as its name may suggest, and so it could be overkill for many. Reacting to demand for Strymon reverb in a smaller box, the company introduced the Cloudburst as the first in a new range of smaller, simpler-to-operate, less expensive pedals. The Cloudburst tweaks the BigSky’s Cloud algorithm to make it more usable in varied musical situations. While majoring in long ambient reverbs with or without textural atmospheric pad sounds, it can also deliver a practical range of more conventional reverbs for everyday use. We see it as a practical proposition for any pedalboard, either as a main reverb or as a creative partner to your regular reverb pedal.
Price: £279 Website: www.strymon.net
ThorpyFX ER-2 Uni-Vibe
Designer Dan Coggins strikes again with his input on ThorpyFX’s take on the Uni-Vibe, the granddaddy of modulation pedals, famously used by Hendrix. That phasey Uni-Vibe throb is accurately recreated here in both Chorus and Vibrato modes, which can be toggled between by a second footswitch in a practical-sized pedal with an easily tweaked four-knob interface. True optical circuitry (like the original’s four light-dependent resistors reacting to a lightbulb’s changes in brightness) powers this pedal, but you get an added Offset knob that controls the transitions between light and dark phases, allowing you to adjust the ‘shape’ of the effect. A great reimagination of a vintage classic for modern ’boards.
Price: £299 Website: www.thorpyfx.com
Boss DM-101 Delay Machine
The organic nature of analogue delay repeats produced by bucket brigade technology is still highly regarded and embraced by the guitar-playing community. Boss knew this when it brought out the Waza Craft version of the compact and long-discontinued DM-2 pedal. While that reissue was a bit of a no-brainer, the Boss boffins have taken things much further this year: equipped with eight BBD chips, the DM-101 puts analogue delay under digital control, delivering the sound in 12 different modes, six of which are in stereo. What you get with this easy-to-use pedal is true analogue delay in the sort of settings that we’ve come to expect from multimode digital units – vintage sound with unprecedented versatility.
Price: £449 Website: www.boss.info
MOD SQUAD
“With the greatest of respect to Fender, the Bi ‐Flex truss rod wasn’t one of its better ideas. I had a predicament on a newly acquired Strat – a worn adjusting nut buried behind a walnut plug and a neck that would not pu
