Post by the other mark williams on Oct 23, 2022 19:39:22 GMT -6
This is one of those areas where I’ll have to respectfully disagree with you, @tomegatherion . I think the Valhalla ‘verbs are better than Strymon’s offerings. I’m not hearing the graininess in Valhalla that you mention. I’ve talked to Sean Costello in the past about porting some of his algorithms to a pedal format, where I think they would really excel. For my money, Valhalla is not often top of the heap - for me, that would probably be LiquidSonics Cinematic Rooms. And Michael Carnes’s offerings are fabulous, as well. Really, there are so many good choices.
Even as a Strymon fan generally: IME, each pedal I’ve owned of theirs has had a near-fatal flaw. And to my mind, these flaws should not exist in pedals that cost the premium that theirs do. I find myself simultaneously inspired and disappointed at the same time by everything I’ve had from them. And hey, I still own 4 of their pedals.
And I think this new plugin of theirs is wildly overpriced.
I'm curious what fatal flaws are you speaking of?
Well, first just to emphasize again: I said "near-fatal flaw," not "fatal flaw." If they were fatal flaws, I wouldn't still own them. 
El Capistan = at least on my copy of the pedal, the tap tempo does not accurately set the tempo I'm looking for. I have to usually tap a little slower than the actual tempo to get it to be the correct tempo. I've never experienced this on any delay pedal I've ever had, and I've had a lot of delay pedals over the years. Maybe it's just my copy. I'm hoping to sell mine and get a new v.2 to see if it's any different. But even if the new version is perfect in that regard, it's still weird to me that Strymon chose to artificially limit the mS range for each mode. I've had times where a song I'm playing was right around the borderline of the limit, and suspected the tempo weirdness may have been coming from that. I know limiting the mS range for the different modes makes the pedal operate more closely to the devices it's emulating, but still, why have that limitation in digital since you don't have to? When I'm playing with a band live, I don't want to stop and think whether that mode of the pedal is going to have the mS range I need or whether I need a different mode for the next song. I just want to tap the tempo the drummer is playing and then go.
DIG = the secondary tempo is, again, not very precise. I wish there were a way to truly play a 1/4 note for the first tap and a dotted eighth for the second tap. You can get it there if you fiddle around with it, but it's not going to be precisely at the spot on the dial where the dotted eighth is drawn. If it were a digital switch (think like the Diamond Memory Lane Jr), you could do this. But I can't get it right on with the DIG in a live situation unless I'm really careful. I also wish the secondary features were labeled on all the pedals, but especially on the DIG. The "series," "parallel," or "ping pong" modes drastically change the feel of the taps, but since it's a kind of hidden feature, it's not obvious how much that's going to affect the outcome. And finally, I still for the life of me can't get the DIG to do exactly the pattern I want. The primary and secondary taps get closer together as the taps continue, rather than stay consistent.
TimeLine = I can get the TimeLine to do a couple of patterns that I really like (patterns that I ought to be able to do with the DIG, but can't). And the TimeLine doesn't have the mS restrictions in dTape mode that El Capistan has. So originally I hoped I could replace the El Cap and DIG with the TimeLine. Alas, the TimeLine can't do the wonderful 80s chorusy repeats or the crunchy 12-bit mode of the DIG, and in its dTape mode the TimeLine is quite inferior to El Cap. In fact, on my copy, the dTape mode on the TimeLine just sounds downright harsh. Turning the "filter" knob to roll off some of the top end of the repeats actually makes it worse. It's like the filter cutoff itself is causing the harshness. Maybe there's a setting I've missed or something, but I've tried to fix this and can't seem to.
Iridium = I don't think the Iridium is flawed, really. If you like guitar amp modelers, you'll probably like the Iridium, as IMO it's one of the better ones out there. But if you don't like amp modelers, I don't think the Iridium is going to be the one that changes your mind.
So there you go. Three effect pedals (+ an amp modeler), all good enough that they're still on my pedalboard after quite a few years. Yet all three with flaws that make me a little bit crazy. They seriously add a bit of stress to live gigs, but they all sound really, really good at the one or two (or three or four) things they do. So for now, they continue to stay. (But they really shouldn't have those problems, IMO...)
