Strymon Riverside

2 months ago

murdoc

16 minutes

The avid reader of this Jounal should have gleamed by now that when it comes to bass pedals, and especially dirt pedals, I avoid digital sound processing like an audiophile that only listens to LPs because vinyl is the only true thing.
Nonetheless, a Strymon Riverside has found its way into my grubby hands and I’m excited about it.
Strymon is my brand of choice when it comes to reverb, and apart from using bigger reverbs for ambient parts, I often run a minimal plate reverb as a tone enhancer, especially for in ear monitoring.
I’ve also owned and used the Strymon Mobius and to this day I think it is among the best chorus, phaser and flanger pedals for their lush and natural sound, albeit being ‘only’ digital recreations of analog pedals.
Looking at how the Riverside works and what makes it tick is quite interesting. There are four cascading gain stages, and the first one is an analog one, JFET driven. The second, third and fourth gain stages happen in the realm of 1 and 0, created by a DSP (Which could be an abbreviation of “despise” if you asked me).
Those four gain stages, or much rather their cascading, is cleverly done by staying on the sweet spots through the entire travel of the Drive knob, so Strymon claims.
The layout of the pedal is somewhat straightforward:
You get your Drive and Volume, and a three band EQ. The EQ sits post drive. Furthermore, you get two switches. The Push switch will push mids just after the analog JFET gain stage. The Presence switch (on the rear) can boost or cut the uppermost registers.
There is one more switch on the front of the pedal, which sets the gain mode – low or high.
I did read the manual front to back because your average Strymon pedal has at least a few hidden functions and some knobs have layers. What I did find was that there is also a noise gate and a boost hidden in there – both functions that I’m not really interested in as a bassist, so I made sure they are not engaged and left them alone.
However, reading up on the other knobs’ functions is interesting. The treble knob is described as a shelving control with wide Q. The mids knob is described as parametric mids control and the bass knob as “Active shelving/parametric low frequency control”. However, no amount of reading in the manual yields any secondary layers or options that let the user access the parametric options on the mids and bass knobs, so I do assume that this happens digital and automatic without any possibilities to manipulate the ~~baked-in~~ programmed nature.
Apart from the Mono in and Mono out jacks, there are two TRS jacks that can be used for a number of functions, among them MIDI and expression pedal to manipulate basically everything as you desire.
Noteworthy is, that when using a MIDI controller, you can save and recall a whopping 300 different presets – if your cover band has an extensive catalog, that might be useful.
As a standalone, you have the favorite switch, which allows to save a single preset and then toggle between the preset and the actual live settings, so you get two pedals in one.

If you’ve never touched a Strymon pedal, let me tell you they feel nice. The form factor is a bit unusual, but they fit a pedalboard well, with all connections being top mounted and the foot switches spaced apart far enough to not step on the wrong one by accident. The quality is all there and the matte aluminum surface looks expensive. They are not exactly cheap, but in case of those pedals I have owned and used, I want to say they were well worth the asking price. These digital models are hungry, though.
Your PSU should deliver at least 250mA for it to work reliably. If you don’t have that kind of juice available, fret not: The pedal comes with a wall wart.
That’s a lot of pre-text and I’ve not even plugged in the Riverside yet.
How does all this creative thinking translate into the real world, and that of a bassist with very special tastes at that?

The first contact was, honestly not what I expected. Which was a very easy thing, because I had no idea what to expect. I had the EQ at noon, as well as gain and volume, and all the switches set to the harmless postiton.
Trying the knobs and switches one by one, I experienced the following:
Volume does, who would imagine, the output volume.
Treble acts in a very subtle way. There is not that much difference between max and min with the lower gain settings.
Mids and bass do more, the difference is clearly audible, but they are also EQ knobs that feel on the subtler side of things. The same goes for the treble switch on the back of the unit.
The hi/lo gain switch feels very linear. Your gain gets bumped some when you flick it. The push switch has the heaviest impact on the drive. Flick it and the Riverside goes to town. You really get a serious bump in the drive by boosting those mids at that particular point.
Which leaves the Drive knob.
With the knob at zero, the Riverside passes signal. The entire output volume is mostly managed by the Volume knob, the selected volume stays level when you twist the drive knob in either direction The output is a bit louder with the Drive at max compared to the Drive at minimum, but not by much. The perceived volume goes a bit up or down when you handle the EQ (of course), but you can increase or decrease drive at leisure without having to compensate with the volume.
On top of that, I will have to take the Strymon Audio Wizards’ word that there are four gain stages which cascade in a manner that is carefully selected to permanently stay on the sweet spot – but I also have to admit that it does feel a bit like that. Talking about feel. This is the crucial point where I did reject most digital pedals, because I complained about them feeling numb. The Strymon Riverside does use an analog JFET gain stage to act as an intermediary between the analog world and the DSP, and call it superstition, audiophile idiocy, analog snobbery or whatever term you can come up with, but I have the feeling that this analog front end helps with the transition between the rough life on the outside and the soulless 1 and 0 representation of something real. Is it the most responsive feeling pedal ever made?
Not even close. A pedal like the Audio Kitchen Fake Plastic Trees, which might be a serious contender for that title, offers a level of connection between the fingertip and eardrum that is a conflagration compared to the candle that is the Strymon in that regard. A candle, however, is more than enough to navigate a dark room. Once your eyes adjusted to the gloom, you can comfortably find your way around. I remember the HX Stomp‘s humble tries at making bass dirt work and the more serious attempts by the Source Audio Aftershock, but the Riverside feels much better than those pedals.
I will go so far as to say that the Riverside’s response is good enough to pass the minimum bar of the elitist gear snob that I have turned into.

Mr. Jounalist, I hear you groan, We’re 1200 words into this review, but you have not commented on how that thing sounds!

And I shall oblige.
With those four gain stages playing into each other, and the switches set back to their harmless positions, with the drive knob just before noon, I get audible … audible …. eeeeh, I’m so much at a loss for words here that I asked google what you get when you “clean dirt”.

The Barclay Earth Depot has an Answer to that :

Clean fill dirt is used to fill in gaps because it is clean and does not contain any rocks, sticks or other debris. This makes it easy to work with and also very compatible, which means that it will stay in place once it is packed down.

Let me elaborate: I often let my probably weirdly wired brain roam free and go with the associations that pop into my mind. You know the like. Feral beasts, tortured in some way, or attacking something else.
With the Strymon in the lower gain, I’m thinking of a little princess, in a white dress made of the finest silk. Skin as porcelain, hair so blond it seems white when the sun hits it and large clear eyes, playing with her toys on her four poster princess bed in her chambers. A scene so innocent and clean, you have trouble bringing it in context with any kind of dirt at all.
If you’re thinking some transition is upcoming that turns the little girl into the one that climbs out of the well in The Ring, you’re on the wrong path entirely. That princess has a rich backstory and you’re really happy to see her play like that.
You get your first gain stage barely producing the slightest bit of breakup, and it feeds into the second gain stage, which does the same and yet again in the third stage, and you might have guessed at this point what the fourth stage does.
The result is that you get audible dirt, but this dirt is so clean, it does not contain any rocks, sticks or other debris (thanks again, Barclay Earth Depot, for having clean dirt!). It’s really so clean you could use it to play lullabies. It’s fairly decent in the term of touch response and I can absolutely use it as a magic tone sweetener / enhancer in these settings, setting the EQ to some gentle adjustments on my tone and expanding the top end a bit. With the easy, even and debrisless grit mixed in when I pluck harder. There is, of course, a bit of compression happening along those lines.

I need to stray off course once more, admiring how the gain staging works.
I use all analog four way gain staging on my pedalboard, where my Fake Plastic Trees feeds into the Verellen Meatsmoke (which in itself has two gain stages, or even four, depending on how you look at it), into the Origin Bassrig Super Vintage. Touching ANY knob on the FPT will mess up the careful balance downstream and I will have to compensate by balancing the FPT and Meatsmoke, so both the contribution of the Meatsmoke and the output that feeds the Bassrig sits right.
At some point, I inserted a compressor between Meatsmoke and Bassrig, which makes the whole ordeal a lot easier because the Bassrig sees an even level now, but it still reacts to changes in the amount of overdrive and different EQ settings.
When I have the equilibrium I worked towards, there is a strong urge to pour a bucket of epoxy on the board. It’s a complex system.
The drive knob on the Riverside does all that balancing on its own, and it feels like magic. Black magic. By ancient rights, you should not be able to achieve that level of auto-cascading by means that are blessed by any of the gods.
Strymon hails from California, the state that is home to both the Church of Satan and the Satanic Temple. Coincidence?

Back to the sound. We’ve established that there is a certain quality to the low gain sounds, something that I’ve not experienced in that fashion, because the cascades are so gentle. But there’s still one half of the drive knob’s travel left, and even when that is exhausted, Strymon has equipped the Riverside with the Push switch and the hi/lo gain switch, so there’s a lot more to experience.

I said the Push switch has the biggest impact on the drive, but I feel obliged to add that I personally don’t really like what happens there. You’re getting into Tube Screamer territory here. There is no low cut happening, but all the energy gets balled into the mid spectrum and while you get an angry fizz out of the Riverside, it also sounds to mid forward so you feel like you’re sacrificing top and bottom end to get these results. I guess that’s a terrific effect for guitar, but as a bassist, I do not really see a proper application for my personal tonal goals. When I run the gain higher instead, either by maxing it out in the lower settings or by running the gain switch in the higher setting, I get a drive sound that has some distortion qualities, but feels more like an overdrive while playing. There is some grit, some metal, but it’s not sounding metallic. The drive is spread out evenly over the fretboard, but the lower notes feel a tiny bit more wooden while the metallic components come out better when playing higher up the neck. It remains touch sensitive and offers some range, but I personally feel that the magic of the four-level-cascade is severely diminished here. It feels a bit like in the low gain settings, you’re in a quiet room, and you have those four voices whispering. Your ears are adjusted to the silence and every nuance of every sound really pops out once you concentrate on the voice. In high gain, you’re in the same room, but everyone is screaming now. Nuances stopped mattering because of the high background noise of the others.
The pedal still feels okay in those settings. As I said, it’s touch responsive enough to control a fair amount of gain by playing dynamics, so you can make use of that.

In most dirt pedals I found sweet spots. Turn up that knob until it feels just right – turn up more and it feels worse. Sometimes, it’ll get better further down the line and there’s another good one. The Strymon tries to balance everything so you’re constantly traveling along the sweet spot, and it’s making a remarkable job of it, too! This is so smooth, it’s super annoying.

But Mr. Jounalist, you cry, is that not a good thing?
No it is not. In my narrow opinion, the best pedal has a baked in sound – which simply is the exact sound that you’ve had in your head.
You get a few knobs to match it to the bass output strength and maybe match the EQ to your setup.
Switch it on and bam. Your sound.
On the Strymon, you feel like you’re not there because there is no there. Instead of the spot which is just large enough to rest comfortably on, you get the size of a football field (that is soccer for the one country in the world that uses the term wrong).

Is a football field a cozy place where you can snuggle in? If you answered yes, please speak to someone professional about it.
If you answered no, you’re right. It is not. You can move sideways and front and back a lot, and you’re still right there on the field.
Same with the Riverside, you have the sweetspot at all times, and you can move up or down just a little, or even a little more, and you’re still there.
I think this is a problem of the mindset. I really like this one edge the pedal can offer – turn up the drive until you can barely make out audible dirt and that’s your first sweet spot. Turn down a notch and you have your clean signal back. You’re standing on the sideline of the football field and you are, at least, unable to move in one direction. Back to one wall at least. That’s probably one reason why I like that setting, because it it does represent a solid point. When you come from higher gain and lower it until you’ve hit the minimum gain setting, you can’t go further in that direction, so you’re finally resting on a spot instead of a field.

One more thing I need to talk about is that this is a Strymon pedal, so there are two foot switches. The normal on/off switch, and the Favorite switch. You can save any pedal settings you desire (knob and switch positions) and recall them via the Favorite switch – so you effectively have the actual knob positions on the normal side and then your saved settings on the other switch, which is incredibly useful when a pedal can do more than one good setting. Use the Riverside as an always-on tone sweetener in minimal settings and then bump up the gain some to get a sound with more hair. Or something entirely different. The possibilities are there. Also, hook it up to your MIDI controller and go completely nuts.
I can assign any of the knobs on the Riverside to the expression pedal that’s hooked to my MIDI controller, and also manipulate the knob positions. As I said earlier, there are 300 save slots available when MIDI is used, so you can be driven completely mad by the sheer amount of possibilities this opens up. Use it as a volume pedal by simply assigning the volume knob to your exp pedal and recall a setting with the drive at zero and the EQ at noon.
Use it in low gain mode, but assign the exp pedal to the drive knob to adjust the amount of gain on the fly.
As an alternative, simply find a few hundred settings you like, save them to the pedal, make a list and then completely freak out when you can’t decide if setting 11, 72, 91, 114, 156, 202, 276 or 281 is better suited for that one part in that song.

Sound Clips:
Bass -> Strymon Riverside -> Origin Cali76CB v1 -> Broughton RFE -> Noble Preamp

This is my Le Fay Karlsson, the Strymon Riverside set with max treble, low gain, just on the brink: