NightSky

Venture to the outer reaches of reverb with this soundscape workstation

- Trevor Curwen

For many players, Strymon has been the go-to company for reverb pedals with its largely conventional Blue Sky and the later Big Sky, which offered more esoteric ‘altered’ reverbs alongside the standard options. The next pedal in that Sky series ventures far deeper into that rabbit hole of altered reverbs and otherworldly ambiances. Defined by Strymon as a “Time-Warped Reverberator”, the NightSky offers real-time continuous control over a whole host of parameters affecting the reverb.

At first glance, the NightSky may seem to have a formidable amount of knobs and switches, but it’s not as daunting as it looks. Having everything on the clear and logically sectioned front panel means that there are no menus to dive into (there are some secondary parameters such as pre-delay, but these are easily manageable), and you get onboard presets so all that creative knob-tweaking can be safely stored away and not lost. 16 presets can be saved and accessed directly from the buttons on the front of the pedal, and there’s access to 300 via MIDI.

SOUNDS

The starting point here is the choice of three basic reverb textures: Sparse, a set of delay taps; Dense, which is like a plate reverb; and Diffuse, a large ambient reverb. While a knob setting decay length is pretty straightforward, the Size/Pitch knob not only adjusts the perceived size of the reverberant space but also simultaneously changes the pitch – either completely smoothly or quantized to a variety of musical scales. There are low-cut and high-cut filters to shape the boundaries of reverb EQ and comprehensive modulation that can be applied to one of three targets – reverb, pitch or filter.