Description

here at Just Pedals we love this Strymon Riverside Multistage Drive Pedal.

Strymon have finally given us what we’ve all been waiting for and it looks like it’ll deliver in spades. A multistage drive pedal called the Riverside which ahs both an analogue and digital circuit in one.

Having both, creates incredible flexibility for a drive pedal, and with the quality that Strymon are known for, this could be the gain pedal to own.

Digital & Analogue
Back to the Riverside,the first stage of gain that your guitar signal hits is the all-analogue, class A JFET circuit. A commonly used distortion circuit for guitars that will dirty up your tone, but still retain loads of clarity and jangle.

They’ve designed the JFET circuit to give you up to 20dB of analogue gain so that you can really crank up the pedal before it starts compressing and ‘sagging’.

However, if you keep the level down and crank the gain, then you can achieve that ‘sag’.

Once the signal has gone through the warm analogue circuit, the incredibly powerful SHARC DSP chip will add detailed and responsive distortion to match the dynamics of your playing.

What does this mean?
It means that the pedal will react like a tube amp, and when you play quietly, the pedal will respond accordingly and when you up the intensity of your picking hand, you’ll create more distortion.

It has a low gain channel for smooth classic overdrive sounds and a high gain channel for modern saturated tone, so you can set the pedal up to match your genre, and then play within that parameter. Or you can use the Favorite switch to tap dance between a high gain setting and a low gain overdrive setting. It’s like having 2 pedals in 1!

Multistage
We’ve touched on the fact that there’s more than one gain stage, but Strymon have actually put 4 gain stages into this pedal that will cascade into each other, adding more gain as you go along.

This will increase the harmonic response so that you don’t lose clarity or top end under loads of distortion.

Flexible
Ultimately, this a very versatile drive pedal that will give you access to classic sounds at your feet, but more importantly will help you carve out your own unique distortion sound.

And the 3-band EQ makes it easy to match the pedal to your current guitar and amp setup.

Here’s what Strymon Say about the Riverside

A new world of drive.
Riverside is the culmination of a thorough analysis of numerous analog and vacuum tube circuits. Our goal? To deliver a new world of harmonically rich, incredibly versatile, tube-inspired drive sounds. We didn’t want to build just another distortion or overdrive. We knew we must examine what has been done, and bring a new approach to the world of drive sounds.

Discover your amp’s potential.
Riverside’s cascading gain stages create harmonically rich tones that are immensely musi