One of the things I really like about the Riverside Multistage Drive is its extremely wide range of harmonically complex drive sounds. Because of Riverside’s multistage topology, it goes well beyond simple overdrive pedal territory. Riverside can be truly thought of as an “amp in a box” pedal. Not only can you achieve subtle overdrives, you can get rich saturated distortions, and a full range of tones you’d find in a great tube amplifier.
Couple Riverside with our Deco Tape Saturation & Doubletracker pedal, and those overdriven tones become even more spacious and wide. I’m a big fan of the Riverside/Deco combo, so I decided to spend a day creating some audio examples using this setup. In the video below, the signal path is simply Riverside » Deco » Strymon BigSky (speaker cab filter only, no reverb) » recording interface. Since I’m using BigSky’s cab emulation and not an amplifier, you can get a feel for the type of amp sounds possible with Riverside. And I’m using Deco as a tape-based swiss army knife—providing many types of tape flanging, tape chorusing, tape echo, and tape saturation.
Hope you dig the sounds. If you have any Riverside or Deco settings you’d like to share, please comment below. Thanks!
Riverside / Deco demo by Strymon noisemaking nerd Ethan Tufts (http://youtube.com/stateshirt).
5 Responses
Great demo! After listening for awhile I began to realize that all of your cool sounds were delivered without a regular amp! This presents Strymon stuff as essential for those who are recording. Everything seemed quiet and overall the tones were fabulous. Well done!
I’d like him to click the Deco into bypass so we can hear what it is doing compared to riverside.
The video shows the Riverside into the Deco…I have the Deco going into the Riverside and it sounds great when I stack the two! I run the whole Strymon board into the front of 4 100 watt Fender Twin speaker amps all set clean. I have no noise and no problems. My signal chain…tuner- compressor-pitch fork-Deco-Riverside- noise silencer-superego-volume pedal-Flint-Orbit-Mobius-Ola-Brigadier-Dig-El Capistan-Timeline-Blu Sky- Big Sky-Boomerang looper powered by 2 Zuma units. I have absolutely no issues!! Great tone!!
Can you say in what order the signal flow is in the video? I see the older post that infer the order but the placement would seem to go against what was stated.
@Gabriel R – The signal flow for the video is Riverside » Deco » Strymon BigSky going RIGHT to LEFT as is standard with guitar pedalboards.