Blake Stranathan

Blake Stranathan is a guitarist who, after being a finalist on MTV's Making His Band at the age of 20, went on to work with artists such as Lana Del Rey, Mary J. Blige, Keyshia Cole and Nicole Scherzinger¹. In August 2014, around the release of Lana Del Rey's album Ultraviolence, he shared his touring rig with Strymon in a pedalboard feature on the maker's site, describing a board built around three Strymon pedals running in the effects loop of a vintage-style Marshall amp¹.

His setup at the time is a clear example of the classic split: gain and utility pedals into the front of the amp, time-based effects into its loop.

The board and signal chain

Stranathan describes his rig as a Pedaltrain Pro with a fairly simple setup¹. The signal path he gave runs in two strands:

The front end covers the gain staging: a wah, two dirt pedals in the Suhr Riot and Berkos Third Stone Fuzz, the Klon Centaur, a tuner and a volume pedal¹. He says the Klon is on all the time:

The Strymon pedals in the loop

The three Strymon pedals carry the delay and reverb duties. The TimeLine is a delay pedal with a looper and presets, built with 32-bit floating point DSP, true bypass via electromechanical relay switching, and a selectable trails mode with analog buffered bypass, all saveable per preset²³. The BigSky is a reverb pedal with multiple algorithms, including Shimmer, and offers a complete MIDI implementation that lets you connect it to your MIDI gear, remotely control any knob, parameter or switch, and select presets via MIDI⁴⁵. The Flint is a studio-class effects pedal delivering the combination of tremolo and reverb⁶.

MusicRadar's reviewer described the BigSky's positioning in similar terms to the rest of the range, saying it "aims to be the pedal that is to reverb what the TimeLine is to feature-rich delay: a pro-quality stompbox that does it all."⁷

Presets switched by MIDI for each song

The BigSky and TimeLine are hooked up via MIDI, with presets stored per song that sync when the next song is loaded¹. This works through a feature Strymon built into the pedals: once the pedals are configured for this control, switching presets with the first Strymon pedal in the MIDI chain changes presets on any other pedals in the chain⁸. For a touring player, that means one preset selection on stage pulls up the matching delay and reverb settings together, rather than bending down to dial in each pedal between songs.

Stranathan used this rig in the studio as well as on stage. He says the Strymon pedals played a significant part in the making of Lana Del Rey's Ultraviolence, on which he co-wrote songs including "Cruel World" and "Flipside"¹:

Questions