There are pedals for everyone. Your drive your gain, somewhere in between. Voice pedals, pedals that fuzz, pedals that cry or waah. Pedals that define an age or genre, or some that are timeless. Strymon are making the old sounds, new. They are taking masterfully decided flavours and packing them in small yet feature-rich housings that will allow you to squeeze the most out of your pedal board without breaking the bank by buying vintage pedals. The Strymon Ultraviolet Vintage Vibe pedal is a move in the direction of chorus. If you’re looking to get wavy, maybe throw a bit of gain through it or even have a more expressive texture in your playing. Then the Ultraviolet should certainly be on your radar.
The pedal allows you to play with chorus, vibrato, or a 70:30 blend of both at the same time. Within each of these three voices, you can boost low, high or mids and choose the shape of your sound. If you want to emphasise the depth of your chords: vibrato on low real slow. If you want to pick things up, get heavenly with it: chorus on high. Within these sounds, you can also shape the speed of the wave, the intensity of the wave and the volume of the effect on output. The coolest part, however, is the expression expansion. If you have an expression pedal you can plug the Ultraviolet in and then shape the sound as you play to custom parameters you set. If you want to kick the speed up a little bit, you can. Or if you want to hammer it home for a big finish, that’s there for you too.
At £259.00 on Andertons this is a pedal that will give you that classic sound and texture without making your wallet beg for mercy. It’s bold, it’s fruity, and it packs a hell of a lot into a package that you can easily fit onto your board. Shoegaze artists listen up, this is one for the history books.