Giving the Timeline/Big Sky combo another chance...

BintyTwanger77

I've ordered both of these pedals from Andertons, arriving on Saturday. As I have a 14 day cooling off period, I thought I should give these 2 pedals another chance. If I'm fighting a losing battle to please my ears with the "SkyLine" (sorry...), then I can always send them back for a refund.

The reason for giving them another shot is that I miss the layout and the ease of storing presets in banks and, as the Strymons preserve your dry signal, they seem to sound great with dirt pedals... and obviously that they generally sound sublime. 

If anyone has these, I'd appreciate some advice, as I don't feel like when I've tried (or owned in the case of the Timeline) these pedals in the past that I've dug into the parameters nearly enough. I know that these pedals are revered by the w**ship crowd, but I would be using these for big grubby post-rock sounds, soundscapes, ambient stuff, Mogwai, Wolf Alice, My Morning Jacket, early Verve....Nick McCabe, I want to sound like Nick McCabe, basically.

If anyone can give me some pointers and tweaking advice for both pedals to create my own epic presets, I'd be hugely grateful. Also, how dark can the Big Sky reverbs get compared to Eventide reverbs?

Thanks, all.

stefken147

I think the biggest thing in terms of reverb is how the BigSky gets out of the way of your playing compared to the Eventide. You can still set a big verb, darken it down with the tone knob, increase the low end a bit on the Hall Mode on the BigSky, and it will just sit there in the background, but combined with what you are playing sounds huge. The Eventide tend to take over your sound a bit, which can also be cool, just different. Check out Bae's amnient playing demo.

 I've recently picked up a Disaster Area DMC2+ for the Timeline, so can control the looper and also control bank changes

Layout wise, the Enentide Space was the best.... I miss my Space......

BintyTwanger77

@stefken147 Eventide-wise I have the H9 Max at the moment, so layout obviously very different to the Space.

BintyTwanger77

Anyone else?

Wazmeister

I loved my Big Sky mate, and Ive owned the Eventide Space too... The latter is more versatile but id edge towards the Strymon

BintyTwanger77

@Wazmeister The Eventide reverbs are mouthwatering, and can get very dark which I love. One thing I've found is that the comb-filtering seems to affect the dry signal, more noticeably when using dirt pedals.

Wazmeister

Maybe the Eventide is yer man then

BintyTwanger77

Wazmeister said:

Maybe the Eventide is yer man then

I will only know after some intensive testing on Saturday...

sweepy

Maybe it's me, but I've yet to find any Strymon pedal that actually makes me go WOW, that's after sampling them at Richtone in Sheffieild Otoh I have a week coming up with EQD, Providence, Neunbauer, Maxxon and Fairchild pedal boards, courtesy of a good mate who works for their UK distributors

Kylef

Big fan of the Strymon Trilogy. I call this my everything-I-need board, but it really is just that. I've only scraped the surface with the Strymons, you could spend months with them and not even get near finding everything.

http://i346.photobucket.com/albums/p437/Kylefarrell/My Pedals and Amps/5B6ECA55-6FCE-4F7C-AE68-5563E74FE35A_zpsio5hcxfy.jpg

keir

I much prefer my strymons over the h9, partly due to the simpler interface of having 3 pedals vs 1 or 2 h9s.

I think with both the h9 and the strymons and as @kylef said above, there's a bit of a learning curve with all of them, it took me a little while before I learned to love my strymons just because they're so deep and some of the presets are a bit out there.

Now, I can basically have any mod / delay / reverb sound I want, this has lead to more depth in creating songs for my band. I have passages with phase, a song with rotary pad type sounds etc.

Buying a single modulation pedal on the off chance to use it for just for one middle 8 in a full set isn't financially really viable, but with the möbius those options are at your finger tips.

I currently run wet / dry into 2 amps and found the h9 with its digital converters made it a big headache, I sold it and now am more than happy with my strymons, I often have all 3 on at once!

DefaultM

Kylef;1141398" said:

Big fan of the Strymon Trilogy. I call this my everything-I-need board, but it really is just that. I've only scraped the surface with the Strymons, you could spend months with them and not even get near finding everything.

http://i346.photobucket.com/albums/p437/Kylefarrell/My Pedals and Amps/5B6ECA55-6FCE-4F7C-AE68-5563E74FE35A_zpsio5hcxfy.jpg

Are you running all those from the pp2+? If so how please?

keir

DefaultM;1141627" said:

[quote="Kylef;1141398"]Big fan of the Strymon Trilogy. I call this my everything-I-need board, but it really is just that. I've only scraped the surface with the Strymons, you could spend months with them and not even get near finding everything.

http://i346.photobucket.com/albums/p437/Kylefarrell/My Pedals and Amps/5B6ECA55-6FCE-4F7C-AE68-5563E74FE35A_zpsio5hcxfy.jpg

Are you running all those from the pp2+? If so how please?[/quote]

You won't get away with a pp2+ I dont think. I've read somewhere that they power up from the 250ma outputs but strymon specify 300ma minimum. I use a pedal power 4x4 for mine.

BintyTwanger77

Update: as completely expected, these things are out of the world.

Big Sky: Really digging into the parameters has yielded some amazing results. I can even get close to the Eventide Blackhole alogorithm with some tweaking. Plate, Room, Hall & Spring all sound great, Cloud and Bloom are spectacular...this thing can get very strange. The one comment I don't understand is that it's too hi fi and bright...you can dial it in if you want, but the tone dial can dampen brightness beautifully. I think the killer with this is how great it sounds with dirt pedals, just tremendous. The way the dry signal is preserved really shows, my dirt pedals sound better through the Big Sky than the H9. An amazing pedal, truly had forgotten how great this thing is.

Timeline: Not much to say on this, other than I've owned one before and it is f***ing killer.

Suffice to say it looks like a number of pedals are going to be on sale shortly. One I'm not going to sell, though, is my Flint, because...tremolo. And occasional reverb stacking.

RaymondLin

It's why I haven't bothered to look for similar pedals to replace mine, keep thinking about the H9 but then I think what's the point. As much as I keep buying other smaller/analogue delays and reverbs, the big Strymons stays.

BintyTwanger77

@RaymondLin I can see why. They really sound great with dirt, even with the mix cranked higher.

DefaultM

Do you still have the nemesis? I thought you were preferring that to the timeline?

BintyTwanger77

@DefaultM It's not that I preferred it, it's as good in terms of sound quality, but I missed the Timeline interface and missed the preset banks, so as I was in a position to get a Timeline again, I took it.

professorben

Yeah much better than that smelly old H9 mate..... Personally I'd get rid asap, you'll be lucky to get £80 for it.....

TimmyO

If I went for the bigger format units over my H9s I think I'd try and stick with Eventide - the app is so bloody good 

Kylef

DefaultM said:

Kylef;1141398" said:

Big fan of the Strymon Trilogy. I call this my everything-I-need board, but it really is just that. I've only scraped the surface with the Strymons, you could spend months with them and not even get near finding everything.

http://i346.photobucket.com/albums/p437/Kylefarrell/My Pedals and Amps/5B6ECA55-6FCE-4F7C-AE68-5563E74FE35A_zpsio5hcxfy.jpg

Are you running all those from the pp2+? If so how please?

Outlets 5 and 6 and double current adaptor from 1 and 2 power the Strymons. The rest use very little current, so are split between the 4. Never had a problem, the MA for each output was carefully calculated.