Strymon Deco Tape Saturation and Doubletracker Pedal V2

Strymon Deco Tape Saturation and Doubletracker Pedal V2 Overview

The enhanced second-generation of the Deco delivers the warm tape saturation and rich double-tracking that made the original a smash as well as a host of new features.

From the inherent warmth and luscious tape saturation to the forgotten art of how these machines were manipulated, Strymon 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. The Doubletracker provides the power to shift your sound in many ways, easily allowing you to achieve syrupy slapback tape echoes, psychedelic tape flanging, and gorgeous tape chorusing sounds.

What’s new in Deco version 2?

Strymon’s second-gen 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.

New Tonal Options

Strymon has added new controls for even more sonic flexibility. Deco now comes with an all-new cassette tape voicing that employs an auto level control (ALC) process common to many high-end cassette tape recorders, resulting in a compressed, fat tone. In addition, a new dedicated Tone knob lets you adjust the tone of the Tape Saturation exactly to your liking, from dark to bright.

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. Lag Deck delay 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 favourite settings.

Hardware Improvements

A premium analogue 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. All this, plus a new ARM DSP chip provides more processing power for every sonic nuance, with less energy consumption on your pedalboard.

Analog Richness.

Give your sound the smooth and warm qualities of analogue 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.

Deco is perfectly suited for a last-in-chain, “always-on” sweetening effect. Everything sounds better on tape. Want to push the limits of tape beyond what was originally possible? Use Deco as a tape-style transparent overdrive—crank the Saturation all the way up to “peg the meters” and gently overload the machine’s input.

Double Or Nothing.

Intensify and widen your sound with Deco’s Doubletracker controls. Turn the Lag Time to obtain classic slapback tape echo, spacious doubletrack chorusing, and mind-bending tape flanging. Add random modulation with the Wobble control and go from very subtle movement to more extreme undulations — just like having a recording engineer vary the speed of the machine.

The Strymon Deco is a great way to the magical sound of vintage tape saturation and double tracking to your instrument or mix bus and thanks to its next-gen upgrades, you have even more flexibility and control at your fingertips.