New Strymon Deco V2 Tape Saturation & Double-Tracker Guitar Effects Pedal

Tape: The First Effect

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. 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.

Classic Sound, New Features. 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. 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 favorite settings.

New Tonal Options. 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.

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

Tape Saturation — Analog Richness. 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. The Voice switch offers two settings — classic (2-track mastering reel-to-reel tape machines) and cassette (auto level control for a musically compressed, fat tone).

Doubletracker — 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. The Blend control sets the mix level between the Lag Deck and Reference Deck. Blend Type adjusts phase and internal routing: sum (decks in phase), invert (Lag Deck phase inverted), and bounce (right Lag Deck bounced to left input for stereo ping-pong or mono double-echo).

Lag Time — Delay, Modulation, And More. Achieve everything from tape flanging at lower settings (-.3 to 3ms), lush tape chorusing (3 to 50ms), snappy slapback delay (50 to 150ms), all the way to spaced out tape echoes (150 to 500ms).

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

Auto-Flange. Press and hold the Doubletracker Bypass footswitch to achieve a recording studio-inspired through-zero flange effect. After releasing the footswitch, the controls are smoothly returned to their previous settings.

Features
Full MIDI implementation with 300 preset locations
Selectable true bypass or premium buffered bypass
High impedance ultra-low noise discrete Class A JFET preamp input
Full stereo in/out capabilities
Studio Mode adds 10dB of headroom for bass, synths, keyboards, and effects loops
520MHz ARM Superscalar processor

Specs
High impedance ultra low-noise discrete Class A JFET TRS stereo input
Low impedance independent TS stereo outputs
Expression pedal input (TRS expression pedal, MiniSwitch, MultiSwitch Plus, or TRS MIDI)
USB jack for MIDI control and firmware updates
Ultra low noise 24-bit 96kHz A/D and D/A converters
32-bit floating point processing
20Hz to 20kHz frequency response
Audio Input Impedance: 1M Ohm; Output Impedance: 100 Ohm
Strong and lightweight anodized silver aluminum chassis
Power requirements: maximum 9 volts DC center-negative, minimum 300mA (power supply NOT included)
Dimensions: 4.5" deep x 4" wide x 1.75" tall
Designed and built in the USA