I recently got out of hardware except for DT2, and have for a long time been looking for a single creative monosynth, and landed on the Intellijel Cascadia, arriving tomorrow!
I know I’m going to want a pedal or two; a good sounding reverb and an interesting delay unit.
I’ve never really taken much notice of pedals as I was about £30K into Eurorack for years.
But OMG there’s so much choice for reverb and delay units I’m quite lost. I’ve looked at ALM MFX, interesting, but not sure if the reverbs are enveloping enough, so looked at the small Black Hole pedal. And delays, just don’t know. Any ideas? Would like to keep the price approx mid range ish.
What are your essential reverb and delay pedals for synths?
Volante is dope, fantastic sound, very versatile. Anything I’ve tried by Strymon has been great, they also hold their value pretty well, so they tend to be a fairly low risk purchase.
I recently bought Source Audio Collider - combined delay+reverb pedal (also can be used as dual delay or dual reverb). Sounds beautiful, especially e-dome reverb - way better than what MC-707 or Digitakt are capable of. Can be a bit fiddly to use, because controls are shared between reverb and delay and also has a bit limited parameters for my taste (e.g. no stereo width option in stereo delays). Still, it’s really nice. If you don’t mind having separate delay and reverb pedals, SA Nemesis and Ventris have same algorithms + many more and also more parameters accessible via computer editor.
For delay it depends on whether you want precision control or anolog mayhem. For self oscillating delay goodness I haven’t found anything that sounds as rich as a Boss DM2W. It also has an external input to modulate delay rate. For precision delay, I’d look at something like an Eventide PitchFactor which has both standard, midi syncable dual delays and the ability to pitch shift and harmonize them. Putting a monosynth into a pitch shifting delay can give you lots of interesting sounds.
As to reverbs, again I think it depends on whether you want ‘studio’ reverb or ‘weird’ reverb. If you’re looking for weird I’d make sure the unit can modulate reverb parameters (lots of them can’t and are just glorified impulse response engines).
Which is a long winded way of saying that I agree with @shovelhead - get an Eventide H90 to cover your bases.
Yes, there is the hands-on specialist single effect vs the compact and versatile multi-effects discussion. It is of course wonderful to discover the effects world, in particular considering that quite a few come in stereo and accept line level. Btw if you go for guitar effects pedals, get yourself a Radial Engineering StageBug6 or alike to accommodate line level to instrument level, otherwise prepare for some unwanted noise and distortion.
Thanks. For reverb I definitely want very high quality sounding enveloping ‘floaty-like’ quality. I hate the sound of most reverbs I’ve come across generally, Eventide is probably a safe bet for me on this.
Delay I kind of want madness and a fair bit of control and pitch shifting stuff, but ideally in a playable / easy to tweak on the fly unit, midi sync a bonus.
Units with like 40 algos turn me off a bit, I can see myself preset surfing, and these units should be set and forget or very hands on - the reason I am getting the Cascadia is my hatred of presets on synths. I just want to make my own thing without preset surfing forever.
The happiest I’ve ever been with a synth was the Microbrute. No presets and I absolutely loved that. Same with Eurorack, but hated the insane complexity and cable mess of that.
OK cool - in that case the H90 might be a bit extreme as it has loads of algorithms, each with a lot of options which may mean you get stuck in analysis paralysis, especially as there are no dedicated knobs for each parameter.
That said, if you want to stay in the ‘studio quality with scope for mayhem’ world that Eventide provides you could instead pick up a PitchFactor for delay and the Space pedal for reverb - they have a more focused set of algorithms than you’ll find in the H90 but with the benefit of hands on control for each parameter. And they’re way easier to ‘set and forget’ .
I am not touching Eurorack with a barge pole. Too easy to be like, oh I can just add this little module to do this 1 thing, and I’m at 600hp again. But thanks anyway! I’ve sold about 60 modules over 4 years, got about 20 left and every single one is leaving. Can’t deal with the eurocrack addiction.
Reverb (something high quality and simple is enough I think):
Eventide Black Hole (maybe space, will look into if I think I actually want the algos)
UAFX Golden Reverberator
Delay (more options for control /chaos than reverb needs):
Strymon Volante
Eventide Pitch Factor. I think this is a good option, looks very dated though. Not that looks are the most important thing.
I will probably get a reverb first and wait longer to get the delay as I think will need more research.