Old Blood Noise Endeavors Dark Star Pad Reverb

The Dark Star Pad Reverb is a lo-fi reverb pedal from Old Blood Noise Endeavors, aimed squarely at slow attack and pad generation rather than at traditional room or spring sounds. Its core voice is a long, dark reverb, and three modes, Pitch, Delay and Crush, layer pitch shifting, delay and bit crushing onto that core to push it into ambient and shoegaze territory¹. Released at the tail end of 2015, it became one of the maker's best-known pedals, and in 2024 it was superseded by the stereo Dark Star Soundscape²³.

A lo-fi reverb for slow attack and pads

Old Blood Noise Endeavors describes the Dark Star as a lo-fi reverb aimed at slow attack and pad generation¹. In practice that means the pedal is designed to swallow the attack of your notes and stretch what remains into a wash of reverb. Delicious Audio's Christopher Scapelliti put it this way: the pedal "shines in creating long and cavernous reverbs, with an optional lo-fi character," and the site added it to its list of Best Reverb Pedals for Ambient and Shoegazer⁴.

One player who uses it exactly this way is Sarah Lipstate, who told Guitar World that she dials the Dark Star's mix control to maximum to blend out the attack of her guitar entirely⁵.

Lipstate's unit also demonstrates how the modes read in a mix: she noted it is "pretty easy to tell the difference by ear between the two Dark Star modes: delay and pitch"⁵.

Pitch, Delay and Crush modes

A three-way toggle selects between Pitch, Delay and Crush modes, and each mode introduces its own effect to the core voice of long, dark reverb¹. The compact original treated these as three separate and independent modes of operation: you used one at a time³.

Alongside the mode toggle, the Reverb knob sets the trail length¹. Pedal of the Day summed up the pedal's character as its "dark pitch shifted, delayed, and bit crushed reverb voices"⁶.

From Pad Reverb to the stereo Dark Star Soundscape

In November 2024, Old Blood Noise Endeavors "souped up its former compact Dark Star Pad Reverb" into the Dark Star Soundscape Textured Reverb, an ambient reverb pedal that Guitar Pedal X called the next evolution of the Dark Star line³. The biggest changes:

• Stereo input and output, with TRS Stereo In and TRS Stereo Out, and the option for mono or mono-in-stereo-out routing³
• All three elements at once: where the original gave you three separate and independent modes, the Soundscape lets you blend Pitch, Delay and Crush together, with individual controls and colored LEDs for each³
• New control set: Decay, Volume, Mix, Stereo Spread, Lag (Pre-Delay) and Multiply (Feedback)³
• Presets and control: three onboard presets, expression control over every knob, and MIDI In and MIDI Out with MIDI control over every element³⁷
• Top-mounted jacks and soft-touch switching, with a bypass footswitch plus an aux footswitch³

The Soundscape is hand-made in Oklahoma, USA, and was available via the Old Blood Noise Endeavors webstore and at leading dealers³. Delicious Audio's buying guide notes that the stereo version, released in 2024, "allows you to blend all three modes at once"⁸. The current Dark Star Stereo lists at $329.00⁹, and Guitar Pedal X's 2024 year-end roundup listed the Soundscape at $299¹⁰.

What reviewers said

Guitar Pedal X's Stefan Karlsson, covering the launch, wrote that "the original Dark Star was a long term fan favourite, but this new edition is something quite a bit more," and that it "sounds superb in the various demos"³. When Guitar.com's Richard Purvis reviewed the Dark Star Stereo in 2025, he found "plenty of control over the reverb's tonality and texture"¹¹. Premier Guitar's editors, in a 2025 buying guide, called it "a digital reverb pedal that lives beyond simple effect categorization"¹².

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