blueSky

The pedal came from a small California company with a big-sounding name. Damage Control Engineering started in 2004, building tube-driven distortion pedals. In 2009 the team decided to get back to building their own gear and started using a trademark one of their colleagues, Terry Burton, had created: Strymon.

The blueSky wasn’t Strymon’s first pedal, but it was one of the early ones. It turned up at the NAMM show in January 2010, on a pedalboard next to a chorus called the Ola, with the company admitting they were “swamped trying to get these done.” By February it was on sale.

The idea was to take a powerful digital chip and give it one job. Burton put it like this at the launch: “We’ve taken a super powerful SHARC DSP and dedicated it to doing one thing only—the best reverb ever.”

There are two little toggles. One picks the space: Plate, Room or Spring. The other picks how it behaves: Normal; Mod, which adds modulation; or Shimmer. Three times three is nine reverbs.

Shimmer is the strange one. The pedal shifts the pitch inside the reverb tank and feeds it back, over and over, so the tail climbs as it fades. On Plate it rises an octave. On Room and Spring it goes up an octave and a fifth. Turn the Decay up and it keeps blooming.

Then five knobs: Decay, Pre-Delay, Mix, and two dampers that trim the lows and the highs. The Mix is done in analog, and your dry guitar never gets turned into numbers at all. It’s quiet, too, with 115 decibels of typical signal-to-noise, and it takes line-level signals as happily as a guitar. The case is anodized aluminum, sky blue, and the name tells you the color.

Here’s how Monder found his sound. “I discovered the sound by accident while I was just experimenting with what the various knobs/switches did, as originally I had borrowed it from a friend and didn’t have the manual.”

On Blackstar he used it for the shimmer, along with its plate reverb, and let a second reverb handle the ordinary job. He says it’s on the main chordal pass of the title track, and also on “the atmospheric overdub on the tune ‘Sue.’” Give that second one some care. On “Sue” the giant wash is his Lexicon reverb unit, mix and decay all the way up. The blueSky adds the shimmer on top. And it’s the Blackstar version of “Sue,” not the earlier single.

The single “Blackstar” came out in November 2015. The album followed on 8 January 2016, Bowie’s 69th birthday. Two days later, he died.

The blueSky turned up in plenty of other rooms. In 2019 Sadler Vaden of the 400 Unit had one on his stage board, next to a pair of Analog Man pedals and a Cry Baby.

Balmorhea used it on The Wind in 2021. Michael A. Muller set it to Spring, Normal mode, with the mix around 2 o’clock, for the electric guitars on the opening and closing tracks. Then they paired it with a real reverb chamber and re-amped it into a live room in Berlin.

In 2022 Strymon replaced it with a V2, adding a sixth knob, MIDI and presets, and called the original discontinued.

The sound that made people ask about string orchestras was never in the manual. Monder didn’t have one. He just kept turning the knobs until the sky opened up.