Strymon Sunset Dual Overdrive: Six Classic Circuits, Two At Once

Most overdrive pedals ask you to pick a side. You buy a Tube Screamer because you want a mid-hump and a tight low end, or you buy a RAT because you want hard-clipped grit, or you buy a germanium box because you want the softness. Then you buy a second pedal, because the first one only does one thing. Then you buy a third, because the second one only stacks well with certain amps. Anyone who has been playing for more than a few years knows the shape of this problem: the drive section of a pedalboard grows by accretion, one compromise at a time, until there are four overdrives on the floor and only two of them ever get switched on in the same song.

The Strymon Sunset was designed by people who had clearly watched that happen. Announced on 9 March 2017 — a matter of months after the Riverside Multistage Drive, and debuted publicly at the Austin Stompbox Exhibit — it is not a clone of any single circuit. It is six of them: three per channel, two channels, either one usable alone, and the two of them routable in series in either direction or in parallel. Strymon’s own framing is that this gives you eighteen usable combinations. That is marketing arithmetic, but the underlying point is fair. The Sunset is a drive section, not a drive pedal.

Nine and a half years later it is still on Strymon’s site at $299, in stock, with no discontinuation notice, sitting in a Drive & Compression category that has since grown to include the Canoga, the Fairfax and the Compadre. In a corner of the market where boutique overdrives appear and vanish inside eighteen months, that is its own kind of verdict.

Where the Sunset Came From

Strymon’s Two-Pedal Answer to One Question

Strymon — a division of Damage Control Engineering, based in Westlake Village, California — spent its first decade being known for something other than dirt. The TimeLine, the BigSky, the El Capistan, the Flint, the BlueSky: time and space, rendered with more care than anyone else was bothering with. Gain was conspicuously absent from the catalogue, and the company knew it.

When the answer came, it came in two boxes rather than one, and the split is instructive. The Riverside is a cascading multistage preamp — four gain stages in series, modelled on the asymmetric clipping of preamp tubes, an amp folded into an enclosure. The Sunset is the opposite philosophy: single-stage diode-clipping topologies, the kind found in classic stompboxes, six of them, voiced individually. Pete Celi, Strymon’s co-founder and DSP engineer, published a white paper on 8 March 2017 laying the distinction out in circuit diagrams, and it remains the clearest single document the company has ever released about how gain pedals actually work.

Celi’s summary of the difference is worth holding onto, because it explains why players who own both keep them both: the Riverside sounds like a tube preamp, the Sunset sounds like stompboxes. They are not competitors. Strymon’s own support staff have said publicly that several people inside the company run Sunset into Riverside, which behaves exactly like putting an overdrive in front of a cranked amp — the Sunset’s diode clipping pushes the Riverside’s preamp stages harder, and the combination is neither pedal on its own.

The Hybrid Argument

The Sunset is not an analogue pedal, and Strymon has never pretended otherwise. Nor is it a digital one. The input is a discrete, ultra-low-noise Class A JFET circuit capable of adding up to 20dB of pure analogue gain, and it is that stage — not the DSP — that gives the pedal its touch sensitivity and the way it reacts when you dig in. Behind it sits a SHARC DSP running custom-voiced algorithms that generate the actual clipping character of each circuit type.

This split matters more than the usual analogue-versus-digital shouting match suggests. The part of an overdrive that feels alive under the fingers is the input impedance and the front-end headroom; the part that determines what it sounds like is the clipping topology and the filtering either side of it. Strymon kept the first analogue and made the second programmable. It is why the Sunset can hold six genuinely different voices in one enclosure without any of them sounding like a preset.

Specifications

The Six Circuits, One At A Time

Channel A: Ge

The Ge type takes the softer response of germanium diodes and pairs it with a parallel dry path that blends more clean signal in as the Drive is turned down. That inversion is the interesting part — at low gain the Ge is barely a distortion at all, more a thickening agent, and it only becomes a clipping circuit as you push it. At higher Drive settings the low-mids are deliberately emphasised, which produces a tight, fat response rather than the woolly one germanium usually implies.

Celi’s white paper is explicit that this is technically a hard clipper with an explicit parallel clean mix, not a feedback soft clipper. That is why it does not behave like a Tube Screamer even when it sounds soft. On single coils it is the most useful circuit in the pedal: it fattens without smearing. On humbuckers it turns into a bold, forward push.

Channel A: Texas

This is the classic one. A single-stage soft clipper with diodes in the feedback loop, filtered before the gain stage to remove low end and after it to tame the top — textbook Tube Screamer architecture, with a signature mid bump and, critically, dynamics that survive the process. Because the clipped portion of the signal generates more harmonics without getting louder, digging in produces more grit rather than more volume, and the transient peaks pass through intact.

If you want to know what the Texas circuit is for, the name gives it away. This is the blues-lead voice, the setting that owes something to the way Stevie Ray Vaughan and Billy Gibbons made mid-forward drive into a whole vocabulary. Compared side by side with a TS808 it is smoother in the top octave and less nasal in the mids, which some players will call an improvement and purists will call a departure.

Channel A: Treble

Not an overdrive at all. The Treble type is a high-headroom boost where the Tone knob progressively removes low frequencies as you turn it up. Fully clockwise it is a Rangemaster-adjacent treble booster, ideal for tightening an amp that is already breaking up, or for feeding a fuzz that goes flabby on the low end. Turn the Tone down and the low end returns, at which point it becomes a flat, general-purpose boost.

That dual behaviour on one knob is the single most underused feature on the pedal. Players who set the Treble type once and leave it tend to miss that they own two different boosts.

Channel B: 2 Stage

A soft-clipping stage feeding a hard-clipping stage through a shaping network — one gain stage, two clipping stages. The result is a complex drive that keeps the low end intact while adding weight, and it has the widest usable gain range of any circuit in the pedal, running from lightly clipped rhythm to genuinely beefy saturation. If you only ever use one circuit on Channel B, statistically it will be this one.

Channel B: Hard

Single-stage hard clipping, diodes shunted to ground at the output of the gain stage, chopping the peaks off. It has far more gain available than the overdrive circuits and reaches into fuzz territory with the Drive maxed. The behavioural difference from a soft clipper is the one worth internalising: a hard clipper responds to a harder pick attack by generating more harmonics rather than passing a louder transient. It fattens instead of clarifying.

This is the circuit that sits closest to a RAT or a DS-1 conceptually, though it is voiced with a much wider Tone range — smooth at one end, properly buzzy at the other. It also responds extremely well to the guitar volume knob, which is the traditional way of using a high-gain circuit as a variable one.

Channel B: JFET

A clean boost that inherits the character of the analogue front end. It does very little at low Drive beyond adding level and a small amount of warmth; as the Drive comes up the signal rounds off and thickens without ever becoming a distortion. Its role is structural rather than tonal — it is the thing you put after a drive to hit the amp harder, or before one to push it into a range it would not otherwise reach.

Famous Players

The Sunset has an unusual player list, and it is worth being precise about it, because the pedal is easy to misfile. It looks like a session-player tool — MIDI, presets, Favorite switch, expression — and it does get used that way. But the confirmed users skew towards people making loud, textural, guitar-forward records, which is not what the spec sheet predicts.

John Petrucci

John Petrucci of Dream Theater discussed the Sunset in a MusicRadar rig tour, describing it as his newest pedal at the time and noting that it has six different modes for different overdrives which can be mixed together at once. He is candid that his overdrives change more often than anything else in his rig — a Keeley Red Dirt at one point, a modded Tube Screamer at another — and equally candid that with a Mesa/Boogie doing the heavy lifting and a 20dB boost on his signature guitars, he does not strictly need a drive pedal at all. The Sunset is there, in his words, in the spirit of fun and as a little something extra.

That is an honest endorsement rather than an inflated one, and it tells you something useful: this is a pedal that earns a slot on a board that has no functional need for one.

Conor Curley

Conor Curley of Fontaines D.C. is the strongest verified case, because his Sunset appears in a Premier Guitar rig feature alongside a full gear list — a 2019 Fender Johnny Marr Jaguar, a ’66 Fender Coronado II, a ’68 Custom Twin Reverb, and a board running the Sunset next to a Strymon Deco, an Industrialectric Echo Degrader, a ThorpyFX Chain Home and an EHX Nano POG. Two Strymon boxes on a board otherwise built from noisy, characterful, deliberately awkward pedals is a telling placement: the Sunset is being used as the reliable gain structure underneath the chaos, not as the source of it.

Philip Jamieson

Philip Jamieson of Caspian described his Sunset on camera during a Premier Guitar Rig Rundown filmed on 2 September 2020, interviewed by Chris Kies. Talking through his gain staging, he singled out the routing rather than the voicings — the advantage of the Sunset, in his account, is that you get two distortions in series or parallel and can blend them. For a post-rock guitarist building crescendos out of layered gain, that flexibility is the entire point, and it is the clearest statement on record of why the Config switch matters more than the circuit selectors.

Dave Keuning

Dave Keuning of The Killers has the Sunset on his solo-career pedalboard, documented in a MusicRadar interview that also shows the board. His use of it is refreshingly unglamorous: he uses it primarily for leads, admits there are settings he has not explored because he found one he liked and stayed there, and rates it as excellent for solo playing. That is how most people actually use a six-circuit pedal, and there is no shame in it.

Others With Photographic or Video Confirmation

Beyond those four, the Sunset shows up on a spread of boards documented through video and photography rather than interview. Rabea Massaad of Dorje has called it one of his favourite pedals on camera. Joey Walker of King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard has it visible on a full-board walkthrough. Conor Oberst carried one on the Better Oblivion Community Center tour, and it is credited on that 2019 album. Stefan Babcock of PUP has confirmed it as part of the rig behind THE UNRAVELING OF PUPTHEBAND (2022). Tim Reynolds of Dave Matthews Band, Jack Fowler of Sleeping With Sirens, and the French multi-instrumentalist FKJ have all been photographed or filmed with one. Jordan Holt, working in the modern worship world with Kari Jobe and The Belonging Co., runs a Sunset with an external Favorite switch specifically to get one extra gain stage out of it.

Two honest caveats. First, several of these are single-photograph or single-video sightings rather than sustained documented use, and a pedal on a board in 2019 is not necessarily a pedal on that board now. Second, the Sunset has no signature association, no famous record built around it, and no artist collaboration behind its design. It is a working tool with a broad, shallow footprint rather than an iconic one — and articles that claim otherwise are inventing a history the pedal does not have.

Tone Recipes

All settings are given as clock positions. The Bright switch sits at neutral unless stated. Assume a clean or edge-of-breakup amp; if your amp is already saturated, pull every Drive figure back by roughly two hours.

How It Compares

Buying Guide

Who Should Buy One

Three types of player get real value here. The first is someone consolidating — if there are three or four drives on your board and you are tired of the real estate and the patch cables, the Sunset genuinely replaces most of them. The second is someone who does not yet know what drive sound they want; the Sunset is an unusually efficient way to find out, because it lets you audition six topologies without buying six pedals. The third is anyone running a MIDI-switched rig, where a drive pedal that recalls presets alongside a TimeLine or a Cloudburst solves a real problem that analogue drives cannot.

Who Should Not

If you already know exactly what your drive sound is and own the pedal that makes it, the Sunset will not improve on it. If you play through a genuinely high-gain amp channel, you need a boost rather than a drive, and a $50 clean boost does that job. If you want a specific vintage circuit’s misbehaviour — the sag, the noise, the odd interaction with your pickups — a modelled version of that circuit will always be slightly better behaved than you want. And if battery operation matters, the Sunset is out; there is no battery compartment.

New vs Used

At $299 new with a warranty and same-day shipping direct from Strymon, and roughly $190 to $230 for a clean used example, the used discount is real but not dramatic. The Sunset has no consumables, no tubes, no wear items and a relay bypass rather than a mechanical switch, so a used unit that powers up and passes signal on both channels is very likely to be fine. Check that both footswitch LEDs illuminate, that all three positions of each circuit selector produce audibly different results, and that the expression jack works if you intend to use MIDI, since that jack does double duty.

Power Supply Requirements

This is the single most common source of trouble. The Sunset requires a minimum of 250mA at 9V DC centre-negative and it will not run on a daisy chain shared with several other pedals. A regulated, isolated supply is not optional. Strymon’s own product ecosystem assumes a Zuma or Ojai; any isolated supply with a 500mA outlet will do. Undersupplying a Strymon DSP pedal produces intermittent dropouts and odd behaviour that players routinely misdiagnose as a faulty unit.

Ownership Notes

Relay Bypass Means No Battery, And No Signal Without Power

When both channels are off, an electro-mechanical relay engages true bypass. This is a superior arrangement to a mechanical 3PDT in every respect except one: it requires power to hold the relay, so an unpowered Sunset passes nothing at all. If your board loses power mid-set, the Sunset does not fall through to clean — it goes silent. Anyone gigging a Strymon pedal should know this before they find out the hard way.

The Secondary Function Menu

The noise reduction is hidden. Press and hold the B footswitch to enter secondary function mode, release, then turn the Channel A Level knob to set the threshold. It is a downward expander with signal-detection logic designed to fade to silence smoothly rather than gate abruptly, and it is genuinely useful with the Hard circuit at high Drive. Most owners never find it.

MIDI Without A MIDI Jack

The Sunset has full MIDI control but no five-pin DIN socket — MIDI arrives over TRS on the expression input, which means an interface such as Strymon’s Conduit or any compatible TRS MIDI box. This is worth understanding before buying if MIDI is your reason for buying, because the expression jack cannot then simultaneously host an expression pedal.

Enclosure and Board Space

The Sunset uses Strymon’s standard compact two-footswitch enclosure, the same footprint as the Riverside, the Mobius-generation boxes and the Volante‘s smaller siblings. Rear-mounted jacks make it efficient on a crowded board. The knobs are close together, which is the usual complaint about this enclosure and a fair one if you have large hands and dark stages — though in practice the Sunset is a set-and-recall pedal rather than a knob-twiddling one.

Long-Term Reliability

Nine and a half years of field use have not produced a characteristic failure mode. Strymon builds in the USA, uses relay switching rather than mechanical, and has an unusually good reputation for servicing older units. The main practical risk to a Sunset is a power supply that cannot deliver its current draw, and the second is dropping it, which no amount of engineering solves.

Frequently Asked Questions