Sonicake Levitate

The Sonicake Levitate is a dual effects pedal that puts a digital delay and a plate reverb in one box, two effects that guitarists often want running together for ambient leads, clean soundscapes and shoegaze-style washes. Sonicake describes it as a dual effects pedal with carefully selected delay and reverb effects built in, and it sits in the company's dual-footswitch stompbox range alongside pedals like the Sonicake Sonic Ambience¹.

The delay side is what Sonicake calls a digital-style delay effect, with independent adjustment of the dry signal and the wet signal, plus feedback and time controls, and a maximum delay time of 2000ms²³⁴. The reverb side is a plate reverb with a large schedulable decay parameter, so you can dial in anything from a slight hint of room to a long, washy tail¹⁵. At $55.99, it is one of the least expensive ways to get both delay and reverb on a pedalboard⁵.

Two effects, two footswitches

The pedal carries dual footswitches, one for each effect, so you can run the delay and reverb independently or together. Sonicake notes the enclosure is a little bigger than most single pedals in order to fit the two footswitches comfortably¹. The second footswitch does more than just switch: a tap turns the reverb on and off, and a hold engages the trail function for both the delay and the reverb effects⁴. That hold function is what gives you spillover, letting repeats and reverb tails ring out naturally after you bypass the effects rather than chopping them off.

On the delay side, the independent dry and wet adjustment means you can keep your original guitar level where it is and set the level of the repeats separately, which is useful for ambient swells or for keeping a lead part articulate under a wash of echoes¹⁵. The feedback control sets how many repeats you get, and the time control sets how far apart they are, up to the 2000ms maximum¹⁵.

The plate reverb side has a large-ranging decay time. Pedal of the Day's reviewer put it this way⁵:

One thing the pedal does not do is reverse delay. Sonicake states directly that reverse delay is not available on this unit³. Players looking for that backwards-tape effect will need a different delay pedal.

Power and connections

The Levitate runs on a standard 9V DC center negative pedal power supply, drawing 92mA. The supply is not included with the pedal, and no battery option is mentioned, so you need a wall supply or a pedalboard power brick output¹². At 92mA it is well within what a typical isolated output supplies, though it draws more than simple analog pedals, so plan accordingly if you daisy-chain.

On the audio side, the input impedance is 470k Ohms and the output resistance is 1k Ohms¹. The pedal uses a buffer bypass circuit rather than true bypass; Sonicake says the special design buffer bypass circuit keeps the sound pristine¹⁵. If you prefer your bypassed signal to pass through untouched with no buffering, this is a difference worth knowing about compared with true bypass pedals.

Sonicake also notes that headphone output is supported, but the signal is mono, and the maker does not recommend it for an optimal experience³.

Where it came from

What reviewers said

Pedal of the Day's 2025 review was positive about the sound, especially at the price:

The same reviewer went further on the character of the effect:

Delicious Audio's Paolo De Gregorio, writing in 2023, raised one criticism about routing. The Levitate runs its two effects in a fixed order, and he felt a routing option was missing⁶:

In other words, the delay-into-reverb order cannot be flipped to reverb-into-delay, and a switch reversing the routing would have been welcome but would have raised the price. For most players running delay before reverb, the standard order is the common choice anyway, but players who prefer reverb feeding into a delay will notice the limitation⁶.

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