Strymon Timeline First Impressions

The Timeline finally made its way from West Lake Village, California to its new home on my pedalboard here in Kingston.

A few first impressions on the pedal and in no particular order.

If you are using a Voodoo Lab Pedal Power 2 Plus then you can power the pedal directly from one of outputs 5 or 6 in the normal 9V position. The Timeline wants 300 mA and output 5 or 6 can supply at least that much. Just do not use both at the same time.

The Gear Page has started a thread on Timeline settings. Some helpful information can be found here.

Be prepared to invest some time learning about the machine. Although the manual tries to be helpful, there are a number of misses:

• No listing of Presets. With 100 factory presets — there is room for 200 but Strymon duplicated the first 100 — there is no reference chart. And there is little information about how to manage presets or save presets outside the box. Looks like spreadsheet time although there is a pdf booklet that can be purchased here.
• No easy way to determine the physical settings for the knobs from the presets. You can look at the parameters that have been set for a particular preset but any tweaking and saving should be saved into a spreadsheet for later recall.
• Unlike their other pedals, Strymon does not offer recall sheets — user settings  sheet — for the Timeline.

A new firmware release is already out. You will need a computer and MIDI to connect to the box. No USB.

The pedal is very deep from a technology perspective. This is not a simple box to get up and running. Lots of delay machines and lots of fine-tuning opportunities. I decided to focus on some key delay settings first and I will take time later to explore some of the more interesting sounds.

The pedal sounds awesome.

Surprising number of Youtube clips already up. Start here for a taste of what this machine can do — you will be impressed.