Strymon is the house that builds the pedal you disappear into for a whole weekend, son. The BigSkys, the TimeLines — deep boxes, a preset for every mood you ever had and forty you ain’t discovered yet. Then they turned around and built the Cloudburst, and the Cloudburst don’t ask you for nothing. One reverb. Five knobs. One switch that does the impossible.
What It Is
A single ambient reverb algorithm — lush, natural, no end to it. Decay, Mix, Tone, Pre-Delay and Mod handle the regular business, and the face of this box stays clean: no screen, no menus, nothing to study. The 300 presets and the full MIDI are in there, sleeping. You never gotta wake ’em.
But the switch. Ensemble — and don’t call it a knob, it’s three positions: Off, mp, forte. What’s happening under that panel is straight witchcraft. It’s listening to 48 separate frequency bands of whatever you play, real time, then building upper harmonic partials off every single one and laying a synthesized string section underneath your reverb — following you, not leading you.
How It Sounds
Flip it to forte and one guitar becomes a choir. That’s it. That’s the whole sermon. It’s a Strymon so the fundamentals is already handled — the tail, the decay, never turns metallic, never gets harsh no matter how far you run the Decay up. But the Ensemble is where the magic lives, word is bond. Hold one chord and it blooms into a slow cinematic pad, and you ain’t touched a second pedal to get there.
On the Bench
- Decay, Mix, Tone, Pre-Delay, Mod (depth on the first half of the sweep, speed on the second) + three-position Ensemble switch
- Selectable true bypass (relay) or buffered bypass · full stereo in and out over TRS
- 300 presets, full MIDI, USB-C, expression input — all optional
- 9VDC, 250mA minimum — this one drinks; check your supply before you buy
- $279 · built in the USA
Bottom Line
The Cloudburst grades a 24 out of 36 — Disciple. Solid box, and you know exactly what you’re holding. It don’t score higher ’cause it does one thing: one algorithm, one lane. If you came to Strymon for the deep water, this is the shallow end and they meant it that way. But as a beautiful, simple, always-on ambient machine with one trick nobody else has — easy recommend, no hesitation. Sometimes you don’t want the whole sky, God. Sometimes you just want a cloud.
Strymon quality. One switch at a time.
They handed you one reverb and one switch and called the job done — and that switch does more work than most boxes do with a screen and a manual attached. Flip it to forte and you ain’t alone in the room no more. That’s the whole trick: Strymon didn’t give you the sky. They gave you one cloud and taught it to sing.
$279. The Cloudburst at Strymon — straight from the maker.
Built something too. Fretsmith — the reference I actually use on the bench: verified specs, string tension, setup calculators. No accounts, no subscriptions, one-time purchase. The pedals plug into a guitar. Somebody has to know what the guitar needs.
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