Old Blood Noise Endeavors Sunlight

The Old Blood Noise Endeavors Sunlight is a dynamic reverb pedal: a reverb whose trails can be held indefinitely, until you play new notes. Where a conventional reverb decays away on its own schedule, the Sunlight's hold function reacts to your playing, freezing the reverb trails when you stop and letting them go again when you pick a fresh note. Gearnews described it at launch as "a dynamic reverb with an additive hold function, which allows you to freeze a note and hold it"¹.

The pedal arrived in 2021 to a warm reception, and it has since grown into a small family: a Sunlight Stereo with true stereo processing, presets and MIDI, and a related Dark Light pedal that Old Blood Noise describes as carrying the original Sunlight sound forward while "big changes looming for Sunlight" are on the way²¹.

What it does: a reverb that holds its trails

The core idea is the dynamic hold. Old Blood Noise describes the Sunlight as "a dynamic reverb capable of indefinitely holding trails until new notes are played"³. In practice, you play a chord, let it ring, and the reverb tail sustains as a pad underneath whatever you play next, then resets when new notes hit the input. Gearnews, writing in its 2021 roundup, put it simply: "This freezes the reverb trails when you stop playing, and creates some super interesting tones"⁶.

The Decay knob sets the reverb feedback, which Old Blood Noise says creates "the potential for nearly infinite trails"³. MusicRadar's Jonathan Horsley found that Decay "adjusts the reverb's sustain, and ranges from subtle ghosting to infinite reverb pads", and noted the pedal is "designed as an early chain pad reverb", meaning it works well at the front of your signal chain rather than at the end⁷.

An Input knob sets the reverb's input dynamic sensitivity³, which is what makes the hold behave differently depending on how hard you play. Gearnews also noted a standard reverb Mix control for balancing wet and dry signal¹.

Tape, Comb and Pass modes

A three-way toggle switch selects between three modes, each of which layers a different effect into the reverb³:

All three operate inside what the maker calls a dynamically interactive reverb³. MusicRadar characterized the pedal as one that foregrounds "modulation, comb filtering and resonant bandpass filtering"⁷. Delicious Audio's Paolo De Gregorio summed up the pedal as "a pedal that requires and invites exploration"⁴.

The controls

The front panel keeps things compact. Beyond the mode toggle, the knobs are³¹:

• Input: sets reverb input dynamic sensitivity³
• Decay: reverb feedback, from short tails to nearly infinite trails³
• Rate and Depth: specific to each mode's modulation³
• Mix: standard reverb mix control¹

Two footswitches do the switching work. The main one is a soft-touch bypass footswitch for true bypass and minimal switch noise³. The second is the Alt footswitch, which Old Blood Noise says lets you "quickly snap to a particular knob setting"³: set your knobs for an alternate sound, and the Alt switch jumps you there and back without touching the knobs. Gearnews highlighted this as one of the pedal's practical touches for live use¹.

The expression jack accepts a standard external expression pedal and gives assignable external control over the Input, Decay, Rate and Depth parameters, adjustable on the fly³¹.

Power

The Sunlight runs on a 9V DC center negative power supply through a 2.1mm jack, drawing 110mA. The supply is not included, and no battery option is mentioned³.

Sunlight Stereo and the color variants

In late 2025, Old Blood Noise Endeavors expanded the sonic palette of its Sunlight mono reverb with the Sunlight Stereo⁵. The Sunlight Stereo is a limited edition, and it comes in two color variants: Yellow⁸⁹ and Black⁸. Like the original, it offers presets².

The Stereo version adds considerably to the original's feature set¹⁰¹¹:

• True stereo processing, with TRS stereo in and out, plus mono or mono-in/stereo-out routing⁸¹¹
• Selectable buffered trails or true bypass switching¹⁰¹¹
• Onboard presets, plus MIDI control over all parameters, with MIDI in and out and MIDI clock¹⁰¹¹
• Expression control over every knob¹⁰
• Analog dry-through¹¹
• An aux footswitch handling tap tempo, reverb hold and preset switching¹¹
• USB-C¹¹

Its control set also grows: Guitar Pedal X lists Dry, Dynamics, Decay, Feedback, Rate, Depth, Time, Frequency (filter) and Wet Level knobs, a Rate control with settings from 1/4 to 4x, and Shape options of Tape, Triangle, Square, Ramp Up, Ramp Down and Random¹¹. Delicious Audio notes that after creating its decays, the Stereo routes the signal through a delay line and a filter, both of which can be brought into play⁵. Power requirements rise accordingly: 9V DC center negative through a 2.1mm jack at 350mA, supply not included¹⁰.

The Stereo ships in color variants. RockBoard's listings show a Black version⁹ and a Yellow limited edition⁸, while Guitar Pedal X notes the standard model is the Maroon one¹¹. Guitar Pedal X also reported the Stereo Sunlight is hand-made in Oklahoma, USA¹¹.

Karlsson's own verdict on the Stereo was that of a writer weighing a purchase: "I'm still fairly keen on the Dark Start and the Liminal, so this sunlight kind of throws a spanner into the decision making process"¹¹.

Where the Sunlight sits in the OBNE range

The Sunlight sits among Old Blood Noise's ambient pedals, alongside the Procession and the Dark Star families. The maker's Dark Light page signals that the original Sunlight's days in its current form may be numbered, describing "big changes looming for Sunlight" while offering a way to get "that original Sunlight sound"². Players comparing the two should note the original's simpler mono format against the Stereo's presets, MIDI and stereo I/O.

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