Strymon DECO V2 Tape Saturation & Doubletracker Pedal

Bought this to update to newer V2 version. One of my favorite Strymon pedals. Features a few nice improvements.

From Strymon:

Add warm dimensionality and luscious tape saturation to your signal. Teleport the tones of yesteryear to your board. Effortlessly create a huge range of beautiful, distinctive, and enveloping vintage sounds.

Our journey begins with the early recording studios of the ’50s and ’60s. The introduction of reel-to-reel tape machines and the creative engineers that used them brought on some of the fattest sounds imaginable. These early machines really were the first effects pedals — they just wouldn’t have fit on your pedalboard

Mid-Century Maverick.

From the inherent warmth and luscious tape saturation to the forgotten art of how these machines were manipulated, Deco brings this original inspiration back, giving you these vintage tape effects from the earliest recording studios, right on your pedalboard.

Deco’s Tape Saturation smooths out your sound with familiar and delicious tape compression and saturation, while fattening your tone with subtle tape-driven transparent overdrive.

Classic Sound

Our second generation Deco gives you the same gorgeous reel-to-reel tape sounds from our original, while adding several significant new features, incorporating technological advancements, hardware improvements and design enhancements to give you additional flexibility, power, and ease of use on stage and in the studio.

MIDI

Full MIDI implementation means you can control just about every switch, knob, and setting remotely by sending MIDI commands from your controller or DAW via Deco’s EXP/MIDI jack or USB-C connection.

Hardware Improvements

A premium analog JFET input circuit ensures superb responsiveness to your playing, and you can select mono or stereo input with the flick of a rear panel switch.

Tape Saturation

Give your sound the smooth and warm qualities of analog tape, along with the enhanced touch sensitivity and playing dynamics that are intrinsic to the inner workings of tape machines.

Achieve incredible transparency at low levels, with reduced high frequency spikes and a harmonically rich low end.

Turn up the Saturation to increase the amount of tape drive, dynamic compression and distortion.

Tape Saturation Controls

Deco’s Tape Saturation side features controls for dialing in everything from light, transparent saturation all the way to smooth, overdriven tape distortion.

Double Or Nothing

Go back to the early days of recording studios, where a few creative audio engineers discovered a new world of augmented sound by pushing the limits of studio tape machines. By inventing automatic doubletracking, they introduced echo, flanging, and chorus to the world of recorded music.

Doubletracker Controls

In addition to Lag Time, Deco’s Doubletracker features additional controls to help you achieve a wide variety of tape based effects.

The Blend control sets the mix level between Deco’s Lag Deck and Reference Deck, and can be lowered to hear more of the Reference Deck for less doubletracking, or raised if you want to hear more of the doubletracking effect.

Blend Type

Adjusts phase and internal routing to customize tone and low-end response:

Sum : decks are in phase

Invert : Lag Deck is phase inverted

Lag Time

Delay, Modulation, And More.

Simply by turning Deco’s Lag Time knob, you can unlock a whole variety of organic, tape based modulation and delay effects.

Wide Stereo

Deco gives you the option for extremely wide stereo imaging to broaden and intensify the sound of your stereo rig.

Wide Stereo Mode sends the mono input (summed if using a stereo input) to the Left channel through the Reference Deck, and to the right channel via the delayed Lag Deck to create an adjustable stereo spread.

Auto-Flange

Press and hold the Doubletracker On footswitch to achieve a recording studio-inspired through-zero flange effect.

MIDI

Our new generation of Deco features full MIDI implementation, allowing you to control just about every switch, knob, and setting remotely by sending MIDI commands from your controller or DAW via Deco EXP/MIDI jack or USB-C connection. Lag Time can be synchronized via MIDI Clock Sync, and the sync setting can be saved for each preset. 300 MIDI preset locations are available for loading and saving your favorite settings.

True/Buffered Bypass

Deco lets you choose electromechanical relay switched true bypass for a 100% untouched, unprocessed signal when the pedal is bypassed (this is the default setting), or you can opt for our premium quality buffered bypass that conditions your signal to preserve its integrity by preventing the high end roll-off that can happen due to longer cable runs.

JFET Input Analog Touch

Uncompromised dynamics and feel. Exceptional touch sensitivity and responsiveness. Deco feels just as good as it sounds, thanks to a high impedance ultra-low noise discrete Class A JFET preamp input.