No MIDI, no USB, no firmware – just two analogue pedals.
Strymon is best known for its DSP-heavy reverbs, delays and modulation pedals, so the launch of Series A – a new line of pure analogue pedals with no MIDI, USB or digital processing – is a bit of a departure. The first two releases are the Fairfax drive and the Canoga fuzz, and both have a good story behind them.
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The Fairfax started as an engineering experiment inspired by the Garnet Herzog tube drive unit built for Randy Bachman in 1965, with Strymon’s analogue team setting out to recreate a complete tube amp circuit in a pedal enclosure. The final design includes a miniaturised preamp, Class A power amp and a custom circuit that emulates output transformer saturation – the bit that’s usually responsible for that organic, tube-like compression. An internal transformer steps the 9V input up to 40V to give it the headroom to behave like a real amp. Controls cover Drive, Level and a variable Sag circuit that ranges from mild compression at lower settings to fuzz-style gating and sputtering at max. A Bright switch adjusts high-frequency response.
The Canoga’s origin began about ten years ago. Strymon designer Gregg built a handful of custom fuzz circuits in an afternoon, and they sat on a shelf until the company needed a fuzz to pair with the UltraViolet vibe. One of those designs became the Canoga – a tweaked silicon FuzzFace-style pedal with just Drive and Level controls. A lot of its character comes from your guitar’s volume knob: rolled back, it clears up into blues, rock and Americana territory; pushed all the way, it’s full fuzz.
Strymon is distributed by Amber Technology.
