Playing ambient opens up a whole new way of connecting with your instrument. It’s an almost meditative practice where building layers of abstract sounds, focusing on mood and texture takes precedence over rhythm or melody.
The argument that your whole rig is an instrument is strongest in the context of ambient music: coaxing textures, drones and shifting patterns out of your gear becomes an art in itself. To do so, however, you’re going to need the right pedals. We’ve compiled a list of stompboxes that are sure to aid you on your soundscaping journey.
Some ambient players rely purely on sustain and space from lengthy reverbs, while others prefer to use layered sounds to create an abstract soundscape. In either case, an ambient pedal’s key feature is transformation. The inherent sound of an electric note is not particularly ‘ambient’ in itself – there’s a strong transient and then a relatively fast falloff. So, in order to create a fuller ambience, the general approach is to do two things: soften the attack of a note and extend its sustain.
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These two things can be achieved in countless ways. A note’s attack can be hidden by EQ-ing out high end, or by rolling up your volume control (or a volume pedal) after strumming to create swells. Sustain can be extended ‘naturally’ with overdrive, distortion or harmonic feedback, but delays and reverbs also extend a note or chord, and can offer some interesting ways to manipulate it. In this context, too, delays and reverbs are often favoured for their cleaner, less abrasive approach to creating sustain.
The Hologram Microcosm certainly capitalises on the promise of transformation: making use of granular sampling, it slices your signal up into tiny samples, and then rearranges them to create incredibly gorgeous and unique delay, reverb and glitch effects. Thanks to the nature of granular sampling, your sound becomes strongly abstracted from the idea of any sort of .
The phrase looper can also help create meaningful repetitions within more abstract soundscapes, and if you’re not feeling in the ambient mood, the pedal is capable of some more traditional effects, too.
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Controls: Effect selector knob, knobs for ‘Activity’, modulation shape and frequency, filter frequency and resonance, mix, delay time, delay repeats, reverb space and time, loop level and loop fade time, bypass footswitch, tap-tempo/rec/play/dub footswitch and hold/stop/erase footswitch
The latest version of EQD’s Afterneath takes a tried and tested digital reverb algorithm chock full of ethereal spaciness and pitch-shifting oddness and adds yet more features.
The pedal’s big selling point is the interaction between the Mode control and the Drag control, with the former adjusting the latter’s behaviour. The Drag control, now adjustable via an expression pedal, sweeps your reverb trail up through a certain set of pitches. The Mode control introduces varying amounts of quantisation, meaning you can have completely smooth drifting all over the place, or some arpeggiation locked to a certain scale.
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The pitch-shifted reverb trails are excellent ingredients for cooking up a soundscape, and if you so please, can completely take over your signal. The extra control and quantisation also lets you adjust how wild and atonal your creations are.
The Rooms is a strong candidate for addition to your ambient board: it’s stereo, it has a multitude of controls, core sounds and expressive capabilities, potentially infinite sustain and of course, that lick of Death By Audio’s signature sonic chaos. There are some traditional sounds on offer, the majority of the six sounds the pedal has on board are designed not to emulate the sound of a particular space but instead to create distorted, glitchy and dynamic ambiences. Notably, some of the controls have secondary options, which are morphed to when the Alt footswitch is pressed.
In classic Death By Audio fashion, when the Rooms was launched in 2020 its marketing copy included the phrase “control the Spice, control the universe.” So if you’re looking for a pedal that will make you see through time, this is it.
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The Freeze is an unassuming little pedal, but it could prove to be the missing piece of your ambient rig. Its function is simple: press the footswitch, and whatever note or chord you were playing will continue. Forever, if you use the ‘latch’ mode.
Even on its own through a clean amp, it can be used with some tap-dancing skills to create a lot of immersion. Where it excels, however, is when it’s combined with other pedals: place it after any reverb to get infinite trails. Pair it with a volume pedal for lengthy cello-like swells. With a little compression and some reverb after it, you’re given a pedal note that gets out of the way of your playing, but blooms back in when there is room.
Description: Sample-and-hold-pedal that extends a chord or note for however long you hold the footswitch (slow and fast modes) or indefinitely (latch mode).
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The Mood from Chase Bliss is pretty far from the one-knob simplicity of the Freeze. It’s a two-channel looper, with each channel sporting some different effects. There’s a lot of complex interconnectivity between the two sides of the pedal (one designed by Old Blood Noise Endeavours, the other by Drolo Effects) far too much to detail here, but in short: you can play a phrase, and then listen as the two sides of the Mood pass it back and forth, adding woozy reverb and modulation until a gorgeous soundscape is created.
The central clock control slows or accelerates both sides of the pedal simultaneously, in harmonised steps. This can be used to shift your loop out of the way of your playing, turning it into strange warbles or deep, noisy atmosphere.
While the complexity of the pedal leads to a steep learning curve, it’s perfect for experienced tone tinkerers looking to up their looping game.
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Controls: Dipswituch bank, OBNE side: Time, Modify, mode selection. Drolo side: Length, Modify, mode selection. Both: Clock, Mix, input routing selection switch
The Swan Hunter combines reverb and echo, and while that in itself is not particularly groundbreaking, neither are your common or garden time-based effects. The two aspects of the pedal interact in a multitude of ways: there’s the Confluence knob, which blends between having the reverb in series or parallel with the delay.
The Fore/Aft switches for both the reverb and echo change how your trails duck in and out as you play: in Fore mode, the repeats or reverb trails can be heard when you play, but when you stop playing they decrease in volume. In Aft mode, the opposite takes place, with the effect stepping in to fill the gaps between phrases. This feature is great for ambient players who want to impart a little bit of melody over an oscillating reverberation, and have its memory persist onwards into the drone.
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The gritty character of the reverb and echo, along with the low-pass filtering add up to some gorgeously filtered lo-fi tones, as if your is coming from an AM radio someone’s lowered into a well.
Controls: Reverb side: Confluence (series/parallel blend), Fog (feedback) Brake / Break footswitch. Echo side: History (main delay time), Haunt (feedback), Memory (tape-style echo repeat time). Both sides: Fore / Aft switches, Ballast control (for ducking sensitivity), Fret low-pass filter switch
The Collision Devices Black Hole Symmetry collects three effects into one enclosure: fuzz, delay and reverb. The time-based side of things offers up some oddness – the reverb can warp the signal in pitch, up to a fifth. Its decay also approaches almost infinity as you turn the knob to max. The delay is a modulated one, and excels in how it balances disintegrating into complete oscillation and keeping the repeats tangible.
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The fuzz, or ‘disintegrate’ in this case, allows for the addition of some more abrasive textures to the soundscapes you’re creating. When combined with the sustaining, shifting nature of the Black Hole Symmetry’s time-based effects, it all adds to something – appropriately enough – otherworldly.
As the name suggests, the Night Sky is a darker, slightly more experimental counterpart to Strymon’s Big Sky. It’s got several features that make it great for ambient music – it’s stereo, for one, which already ups the immersion. Separate mix controls for wet and dry signals let you fine-tune the sound further, and a dedicated Infinite footswitch captures any given sound and extends it out into space forever.
While traditional reverb sounds are on offer here, the pedal also excels at woozy, unique sounds. A huge preset bank and the ability to morph between two sounds at the press of a footswitch further cements the NightSky as an ambient ‘workstation’ rather than just a pedal.
Strymon Cloudburst Ambient Reverb Guitar Effect Pedal With Midi
Controls: Modulation speed and depth with buttons for target and shape; decay length and size/pitch with buttons for texture and quantize; tone low cut and high cut with button for filter response; voice interval and shimmer level with buttons for shimmer type, glimmer and overdrive; reverb and dry output levels; preset/sequence buttons 1-8; footswitches for bypass, favourite and infinite with secondary functions; instrument/line input level switch
Like the Freeze, the Tyler is a little more of a ‘utility’ pedal that just so
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