TimeLine

The TimeLine started with engineers who wanted out. In 2004 three of them, “grown tired of working for big companies,” started Damage Control Engineering in California: Pete Celi on DSP and sound design, Gregg Stock on analog circuits, Dave Fruehling on firmware. A company history from ten years later counts a fourth founder too, the industrial designer Lucian Tu. Depends which page you read.

Celi had come through Analog Devices, Alesis, and Line 6. Damage Control’s pedals mixed digital processing with real tubes, and one of them was called the TimeLine. It had two 12AX7s inside and seven delay modes. Celi remembers it fondly:

Each project presents a new set of challenges and discoveries, but the development of the Damage Control TimeLine stands out as a special one.

In 2009 the team went back to building its own gear under a new name, Strymon. The old tube TimeLine, Celi says, was “the genesis of the Strymon TimeLine.”

The new one was shown at the NAMM show in January 2011, and it was shipping by the end of that summer. Same name, different pedal. The Strymon TimeLine has no tubes at all. It has a SHARC processor, 24-bit converters, and twelve delay “machines” instead of seven modes.

Your dry guitar never gets turned into numbers, though. It runs on an analog path straight through, with zero latency, and only the echoes go digital. Switch it off and it can either step out of the way entirely or let the last repeats ring out.

Seven knobs sit across the top: Time, Repeats, Mix, Filter, Grit, and two for modulation. There are 200 presets. The ability to name them came in a firmware update in February 2012, along with a tapped tempo that carries across all of them. And there’s a 30-second stereo looper you can put before or after the delay.

The machines are where the personality is. Digital, Dual, Pattern, Reverse, Ice, Duck, Swell, Trem, Filter, Lo-fi, dTape, and dBucket. The last two are Strymon’s takes on old hardware: dTape on a tape echo with a sliding head, dBucket on an analog bucket-brigade delay. Celi explains what he was after with that one:

“A big part of the character of an analog delay is the fact that it’s running on this variable clock system where the number of buckets stay the same, but it’s just how fast you’re running through the buckets.”

In plain terms, an analog delay always passes your note down the same number of steps. Change the delay time and it just runs them faster or slower, and that changes the sound of the repeats too. Copying that, and not just the timing, is the point.

Jean-Philip Grobler of St. Lucia made Matter in 2016 with a TimeLine and a BigSky, Strymon’s reverb. “Basically all of the ambient effecty stuff was done with the TimeLine and BigSky,” he said. So the delay shares that credit with a reverb. Live, the TimeLine is “sometimes a modulated slap, and sometimes it’s a really long and really obvious cutting delay.” He wishes he could fit four of each on his board.

Hammock, the duo of Marc Byrd and Andrew Thompson, went to one machine in particular for Mysterium, the record that followed the death of Byrd’s nephew Clark in 2016. Matthew Kidd, who records as Slow Meadow, had shown them the Lo-fi machine. “We used the lofi setting on the TimeLine quite a bit on this record,” they said. “It was great for creating textural decaying type sounds.”

Put that one on and listen to how the sounds wear away as they fade.

By 2022, Chris Shiflett of the Foo Fighters had a couple of TimeLines on his board, one for each amp. In 2025 Noel Gallagher took one on the Oasis reunion tour, alongside Strymon’s El Capistan tape echo. In 2026, fifteen years after the first, Strymon announced the TimeLine MX, a separate pedal.

The engineers built the box because they wanted to make their own things again. What they handed everyone else was 200 empty slots. Gavin filled two of them, and called them Double and Synth.