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.

2 replies
  1. Jake
    Jake says:

    The Voodoo Lab PP2+ only supplies 250mA on outputs 5 and 6. The TimeLine may intermittently shut off if under-supplied, but the new Pedal Power Digital is designed for pedals like this and works like a charm supplying 400 mA per outlet. Also, the previously released ISO-5 works great and supplies 300 mA per outlet. Both power supplies are absolutely quiet so you won’t get any noise as well.

    Reply
    • Richard Cleaver
      Richard Cleaver says:

      Hi Jake,

      I spoke with the support folks at Voodoo Lab. Outputs 5 and 6 on the Pedal Power 2+ are rated at only 250 mA each. However, Voodoo Lab confirmed that those outputs are capable of sourcing over 300 mA safely as long as the total load on outputs 5 and 6 do not exceed 500 mA. Each one on its own can do about 330-350 mA. I have not had any issues running my Timeline this way.

      Reply

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