Gear of the Year RESULTS: Best Effects Pedals of 2013

Which pedal took the top spot in our Gear of the Year Awards?   05-Jan-14

1) Strymon Big Sky

When the Strymon Big Sky was voted into the top five by our readers, how could our panel NOT crown it as the best effects pedal of the year?

Everything about it is stunning, and there really are no surprises as to why Strymon have gone from cult boutique pedal makers to uber fashionable pedal board pornographers, their products sound great, they look great, they're perfectly engineered, and they essentially fit a whole studio rack's worth of effects and patches into a tiny little box for using on the road.

The Strymon Big Sky, is in our opinion, one of the company's greatest achievements yet. Not only is studio quality reverb on offer, with just about every parameter and variable you could dream of, but the ability to manipulate this pedal in real-time as a creative tool is just on a different level to any reverb we've tried before.

So, in what was CERTAINLY the closest and most difficult decision of the SonicState Gear of the Year Awards 2013, we've decided to make the Strymon the winner. But let it be said that all the pedals in the top five are perfect in their own way.

This category in the awards is actually a testament to what is burgeoning industry, with three of the companies in the top five being formed within the last decade. The remaining two - TC and Eventide - are the best examples of companies which have adapted well to the changing marketplace and have left some of their original competitors from previous decades in the dirt.

So there we have it, the Strymon BigSky - winner of the effects pedal category in the SonicState Gear of the Year Awards.