Before there were pedals there were amplifiers, and inside the good ones there were two circuits that guitarists have never stopped chasing. One made the volume breathe. The other made the room bigger than it was. Tremolo and reverb were bolted into the same chassis by accident of engineering economics — Fender put them there because there was space and because the transformer could take it — and half a century of recorded music has been built on that accident.
The Strymon Flint Tremolo & Reverb is the pedal that took the accident seriously. It arrived in 2012, it did not try to be a Swiss Army knife, and it made one specific argument: that if you are going to put an amp’s tremolo and an amp’s reverb into a stompbox, you should model three of each, from three different decades, and get all six of them right. Fourteen years later that argument has held up better than almost anything else in the digital-modelling category. There is a second-generation Flint now. The sounds did not change. That tells you most of what you need to know.
This is a gear guide, not a review. What follows is what the Flint actually is, what it actually does, who has actually been photographed using one, and — because the internal brief that generated this article contained at least two artist claims that do not survive contact with a primary source — where the received wisdom about this pedal is simply wrong.
A Note On The Artist Column, Because Two Of Four Names Failed
The brief handed to this article listed four players as Flint users: The Edge, John Mayer, Mark Lettieri and Mateus Asato. One of those is documented in an editorial source. One is a crowd-submitted photograph with no first-party confirmation. Two appear to be brand-adjacent guesswork.
The Famous Players section below tiers every name by the strength of the evidence, and it says out loud which claims collapsed. This matters more than usual on a Strymon product, because Strymon pedals are so ubiquitous on professional boards that “probably has one” feels like a safe assumption — and safe assumptions are how bad gear journalism propagates. A pedal with 225 crowd-logged professional users does not need inflated credits.
Origins: Three Engineers, A Rebrand, And A Very Specific Idea
Strymon did not start as Strymon. The company began life in 2004 as Damage Control Engineering, building tube-driven pedals in Westlake Village, California, and rebranded under the Strymon name in 2009 with the OB.1 compressor. The founding engineers — Pete Celi, Gregg Stock and Dave Fruehling — came out of Line 6 and Alesis, which is to say they came from the exact intersection of DSP research and studio hardware that the Flint would eventually depend on.
That background explains the Flint’s design philosophy better than any marketing copy. Most reverb pedals of the era offered a spring algorithm and a hall algorithm and called it a day. The Flint’s three reverbs are each modelled on a specific class of machine from a specific decade, and its three tremolos are each modelled on a specific amplifier circuit topology rather than on “tremolo” as a generic idea. Strymon’s own framing on the product page is that they “carefully studied our favorite classic tremolo and reverb circuits, examined the sonic complexities and faithfully accounted for every detail.”
The original Flint shipped in 2012 and became one of the two or three products that turned Strymon from a boutique curiosity into a default. In May 2022 it was replaced by the Flint V2 as part of Strymon’s Next Generation platform rollout, alongside updated versions of El Capistan, Brigadier and others. The V2 kept every algorithm and rebuilt everything around them.
The Three Tremolos
’61 Harmonic
The star of the pedal, and the reason a lot of people buy it. Harmonic tremolo is not volume modulation at all. It is a band-splitting circuit that sends low and high frequencies through opposed phase paths and alternates between them, so instead of the signal getting louder and quieter, the tonal centre of the signal sloshes back and forth between dark and bright. Fender built this into a handful of brownface amps around 1961 and then abandoned it because it was expensive and complicated. Everyone has been trying to get it back ever since.
Played slowly it is closer to a vibe or a phaser than a tremolo — Guitar.com’s V2 review singled out the “sloshy, warbly” character of this mode specifically. Played fast it does something no volume tremolo can do, because the note never actually disappears; it just keeps changing colour.
’63 Tube (Power Tube Bias)
The swampy one. This models bias-varying tremolo, where the modulation is applied to the bias point of the output tubes themselves. Because you are pushing the power section in and out of its happy operating range, the effect interacts with the amp’s own compression — the quiet part of the cycle is not just quieter, it is softer and rounder and slightly less articulate. That asymmetry is what gives bias tremolo its lope. It is the sound of Creedence, of early Neil Young, of anything recorded through a black-panel Fender with the Speed knob at nine o’clock.
’65 Photocell (Opto)
The sharp one. Blackface-era Fenders drove a small lamp with an oscillator and pointed it at a light-dependent resistor, and the LDR’s response curve produced a harder, more defined chop than the tube-bias circuit could manage. This is the mode for surf, for spaghetti-western eighth notes, for anything where you want the tremolo to be audibly rhythmic rather than atmospheric. It also takes high Intensity settings the best of the three — cranked, it approaches a hard on/off gate.
The Three Reverbs
’60s Spring
Modelled on a full-size two-spring tank of the type bolted into vintage guitar amps — not the short three-spring units found in later combos, which is a meaningful distinction. Longer springs mean longer, more diffuse decay and less of the metallic “boing” that short tanks produce when you kick them. Strymon’s version drips rather than clangs.
’70s Plate
Described by Strymon as an electronic plate using multi-tap parallel delay lines with filtered feedback paths — in other words, a model of the solid-state plate emulators that studios adopted when actual steel-plate units became impractical to house. It is darker and denser than the spring, with a flatter frequency response and no early-reflection detail, and at maximum Decay it approaches infinite sustain. This is the mode most Flint owners end up living in.
’80s Hall
A model of an early digital rack hall — a studio microprocessor unit with modulating delay lines, which is the technically precise way of saying “a Lexicon-style box from the era when digital reverb was new enough to be a production statement.” It is the largest of the three, the most modulated, and the one that pushes a clean guitar straight into ambient territory. It also, like the plate, approaches infinite decay at maximum.
Specifications
What V2 Actually Changed — And What It Deliberately Didn’t
The most important fact about the Flint V2 is a negative one: the algorithms are the same. Strymon did not “improve” the tremolo or the reverb, because the sounds were the reason the pedal sold in the first place. Everything that changed is around the sounds.
The front end became a discrete Class A JFET preamp, replacing the original’s op-amp input, which subtly changes how the pedal responds to a hot pickup hitting it hard. The processor moved to an ARM chip, which delivers more headroom for the algorithms while drawing less current. Input became switchable between mono and stereo via a rear-panel toggle, with a single TRS jack keeping the enclosure the same size — outputs were already stereo. Full MIDI arrived, over both the EXP jack and a USB-C port, along with 300 preset slots and MIDI Clock Sync for the tremolo.
Two functional additions matter musically rather than logistically. The Speed knob’s minimum was extended down to roughly 1 Hz, which turns the harmonic tremolo into a genuinely glacial sweep rather than a slow wobble. And reverb pre-delay became adjustable via Live Edit and savable per preset — a small thing that transforms the plate and hall modes, because pre-delay is the parameter that lets a big reverb sit behind the note instead of on top of it.
The Effect Order function, also a Live Edit secondary and savable per preset, lets you run reverb into tremolo or tremolo into reverb. This is not a gimmick. Tremolo-then-reverb gives you a chopped signal being smeared by a static room, which sounds like an amp. Reverb-then-tremolo chops the reverb tail itself, which sounds like nothing that has ever existed in a physical space, and is the single best ambient trick in the pedal.
Famous Players: What The Evidence Actually Supports
Tier 1 — Editorially Documented
Mike Sullivan (Russian Circles). The strongest and most recent confirmation. Premier Guitar’s December 2025 Rig Rundown, filmed at the band’s Chicago practice space after Sullivan rebuilt his rig following a 2021 tour theft, lists a Flint on his “motherboard” alongside a Strymon Dig and a Strymon TimeLine. In a post-metal context the Flint is doing atmospheric work rather than surf work — Hiwatt heads, Dunable guitars in DADGAD-derived low tunings, and a reverb pedal whose job is to make the quiet passages enormous before the riff lands.
Mateus Asato. Guitar.com’s coverage of Asato’s September 2021 pedalboard walkthrough documents a Strymon Flint on the board alongside four Jackson Audio pedals — the Asabi and Golden Boy overdrives, Bloom compressor and Modular Fuzz — plus a Dunlop Echoplex delay. Worth noting for honesty’s sake: when Asato publicly named his favourite underrated reverb in July 2023, he named a Neunaber Wet V5, not the Flint. Both things are true. He used one; it is not the pedal he evangelises about.
Gary Clark Jr. The most useful entry on this list, because his settings are on record. A Tone Report rig feature documented a Flint on his board with the reverb set to ’70s — described as being chosen because it is “a little dirtier” — and the tremolo set to ’63. The pedal also comes up in Premier Guitar’s 2019 interview around This Land. If you want a starting point for the Flint in a loud blues-rock context, that is it, and it is reproduced in the Tone Recipes section below.
Tier 2 — Photographic And Crowd-Sourced
Equipboard logs 225 professional users for the original Flint, which is a large number even by Strymon standards. The following are entries backed by a specific photograph, video timestamp or dated source, and are presented as crowd-submitted evidence rather than first-party confirmation:
- Noel Gallagher — pedalboard photo posted to his own Instagram, new as of October 2016, Flint in the upper-left position with the Strymon logo covered by a “LOOP10” label.
- Billy Corgan — pedalboard photograph dated 7 October 2013.
- Graham Coxon — visible in video at a logged timestamp.
- Chris Shiflett — his own posted board photo, built by tech Sean Cox.
- Guthrie Govan — visible on his board in a video in which he also discusses the pedal on camera.
- Justin Vernon (Bon Iver) — a Flint appears in a rack tray in XAct Tone Solutions’ published photo gallery of the rack systems they built for the band.
- Nick Valensi (The Strokes) — board photograph from Lollapalooza Chicago, 2019.
- Ray Toro (My Chemical Romance) — posted photograph.
- Mike Kerr (Royal Blood) — video timestamp, notable because it is a bass rig.
- Tycho — logged as a user; relevant because the Flint’s plate and hall modes are as much a synth and keys tool as a guitar one.
Premier Guitar has separately documented Flints on the recording board of My Chemical Romance’s Frank Iero, in a four-Strymon cluster with El Capistan and Iridium, and on one of Idles’ stage boards.
Claims That Did Not Hold Up
The Edge. Listed in the brief, unsupported by anything we could find. The Edge’s tremolo and modulation have historically come from rack processors managed by tech Dallas Schoo rather than from stompboxes, and the well-documented change to his rig in the 2023–24 Sphere residency era was the move to Universal Audio UAFX amp emulators, not a reverb pedal addition. Nothing in the available coverage of his rig places a Flint on it. Treat this as unproven.
Mark Lettieri. Also listed, also unsupported for this SKU. His documented boards — the Premier Guitar Fearless Flyers rundown, the Snarky Puppy coverage, his 2025-era rig with the Keeley Monterey, J. Rockett HRM and his signature Melody OD — show no Flint. He is a documented user of the Walrus Audio Monument V2, which is very likely where the confusion originates: right player, right effect category, wrong box.
John Mayer. Equipboard’s top-listed Flint user, on the strength of a single user-uploaded photograph with no accompanying editorial source. Possible, unconfirmed, and worth flagging precisely because his name at the top of a usage list is exactly the kind of thing that gets copied into a hundred product descriptions without anybody checking.
Tone Recipes
The Gary Clark Jr. Setting
Reverb ’70s plate, tremolo ’63 tube. Decay around 10 o’clock, Mix around 11, Color at noon. Speed at 9 o’clock, Intensity at 11. The plate is doing thickening rather than ambience, the bias tremolo is doing a slow lope, and the whole thing is designed to survive being hit with a loud amp and a fuzz. Start here for anything blues-rock.
Brownface Slosh
Tremolo ’61 harmonic, Speed at 8 o’clock (V2 only — this is where the extended range earns its keep), Intensity at 2 o’clock. Reverb ’60s spring, Decay 11, Mix 11, Color 1 o’clock. Play cleanly with the neck pickup and let chords ring. This is the closest the pedal gets to a rotary or a vibe, and it does not sound like any other tremolo pedal on the market.
Surf Chop
Tremolo ’65 photocell, Speed at 1 o’clock, Intensity at 3. Reverb ’60s spring, Decay at 2 o’clock, Mix at 1, Color at 2 o’clock for maximum splash. Bridge pickup, heavy pick, palm off. The photocell mode’s hard edge is what makes this work; the harmonic mode cannot do it and the tube mode is too soft.
Ambient Pad
Reverb ’80s hall, Decay at 4 o’clock, Mix at 2, Color at 11 for a darker tail, pre-delay pushed up via Live Edit so the attack stays audible. Tremolo ’61 harmonic, Speed at minimum, Intensity at 10 o’clock. Set Effect Order to reverb-into-tremolo so the modulation works on the tail rather than the source. This is the single best argument for the V2 over the V1.
Amp-In-The-Room
Reverb ’60s spring, Decay 9 o’clock, Mix 9, Color noon. Tremolo off. Buffered bypass, reverb engaged permanently, +1 to +2 dB of reverb-side boost dialled in via Live Edit. The goal is not an audible effect — it is to stop a direct or an amp without reverb from sounding like it is in a vacuum. Most Flint owners eventually discover this is what they use it for.
Panning Stereo Trem
Run the outputs to two amps. Tremolo ’65 photocell at moderate Speed, Intensity high. Reverb ’70s plate underneath at low Mix. The Flint’s stereo outputs make the volume modulation read as movement across the stereo field rather than as pulsing in place, which is a substantially different musical effect.
Slow Bias Under Fuzz
Tremolo ’63 tube, Speed at 7 o’clock, Intensity at 4 o’clock, placed after a fuzz. The bias mode’s soft trough is the only one of the three that lets a fully saturated signal sag rather than gate. Pair it with something like the EarthQuaker Devices Hoof and turn the reverb off entirely.
Knob positions are given as clock references. Mix at 3 o’clock is Strymon’s own stated 50/50 dry/wet point, which is a useful landmark — most of what you want lives below it.
Where It Goes In The Chain
The Flint belongs at the end of the board, after drive and modulation and generally after delay, though delay-after-reverb is a legitimate ambient choice. The internal effect order matters as much as the external position: with tremolo first, you get an amplifier simulation; with reverb first, you get something synthetic and much larger.
If you run a separate flagship reverb — a Strymon BigSky or a Boss RV-500 — the Flint still earns its space, because its tremolo is the best part of the pedal and the spring mode is a different tool than a big ambient machine. A common professional arrangement is Flint for always-on spring plus tremolo, big box for the set pieces.
With an amp-modeller front end like the Strymon Iridium or the UAFX Dream ’65, put the Flint after it. Strymon’s own audio demos for the Flint are all recorded with exactly that topology — drive into Iridium into Flint — which is as clear a statement of intended placement as a manufacturer ever makes.
How It Compares
Against Dedicated Tremolos
The Boss TR-2 is a single-voice opto-style tremolo at a fraction of the price and it does that one job honourably. The MXR M305 adds waveform selection in a mini enclosure. The Walrus Audio Monument V2 is the closest direct rival on the harmonic side and adds tap tempo, which the Flint conspicuously lacks without an external switch. If tremolo is the only thing you need, all three are more sensible purchases. The Flint’s case is that you get a genuinely first-rate harmonic tremolo and a genuinely first-rate reverb in one nine-volt slot.
Against Dedicated Reverbs
The Boss RV-6, the TC Electronic Hall of Fame 2 and the EHX Oceans 11 all offer more reverb algorithms for less money. None of them offers three, only three, chosen with this much editorial conviction. The Flint’s reverb section is narrow on purpose. Its spring is better than the spring in any of those boxes; its shimmer is nonexistent, because it does not have one.
Against The Walrus Pairing
The obvious modern alternative to one Flint is two Walrus pedals: the Fathom or Slö for reverb plus the Monument for tremolo. You end up with more sonic territory — the Slö in particular goes places the Flint cannot — at the cost of two power draws, two footprints and no shared preset. The Flint is the tighter, more conservative, more amp-like answer.
Against An Actual Amp
Worth stating plainly: if you own a Supro Black Magick Reverb or a Magnatone Varsity Reverb, you already have a version of what the Flint is modelling, and the real circuit will interact with your playing in ways a pedal after the amp cannot. What the Flint gives you that the amp does not is three flavours instead of one, a defeatable footswitch, stereo, and the ability to put it in front of a direct box at four in the morning.
Buying Guide
The V2 sells direct from Strymon at $349 and was in stock as of September 2026, shipping same or next business day. It is not discounted, and Strymon holds pricing firmly across the dealer network, so hunting for a deal on a new one is mostly wasted effort.
The V1 is discontinued and trading around $230 used. That is the single most interesting number in this guide, because the algorithms are identical. What you give up going V1 is: MIDI and presets, the JFET input, switchable stereo input, adjustable pre-delay, the extended slow Speed range, per-side boost/cut and the Effect Order function. What you keep is every sound the pedal was famous for. If you play one amp, in mono, without a MIDI switcher, and you do not need the ambient reverb-into-tremolo trick, the V1 at $230 is arguably the better buy and it is not close.
Buy the V2 if: you run stereo, you use a MIDI controller, you want presets, or you specifically want the slow harmonic sweep and adjustable pre-delay. Buy the V1 if: none of that applies and you would rather spend the difference on a second pedal.
Watch for on the used market: the pedal has no known reliability pattern worth worrying about, but check that the power jack is solid and that both footswitches engage cleanly, since Strymon’s soft-touch switches are the only mechanical wear item. Original box and the correct power supply add little to value — the Flint uses a standard 9V centre-negative supply, not a proprietary one.
Ownership Notes
Current draw is the first thing to check. The Flint needs 9V DC centre-negative at a minimum of 300 mA. No power supply is included. A great many daisy chains and cheap bricks cannot supply that on a single isolated output, and an underpowered Flint will behave erratically rather than fail cleanly. This is the single most common source of “my Flint is broken” reports.
No battery operation. Like every Strymon DSP pedal, there is no battery compartment and no signal without power.
Bypass is selectable. True bypass is the factory-familiar option, but the buffered mode is worth trying if the Flint sits at the end of a long chain — Strymon’s buffer is well regarded and can recover top end that a long cable run has eaten. Buffered mode also allows reverb tails to decay naturally when you disengage, rather than being cut off.
Live Edit takes learning. Five of the pedal’s more interesting parameters — Effect Order, Tap Division, Pre-Delay and both boost/cut controls — live under a secondary function layer accessed by holding a footswitch and moving a knob. They are savable per preset on the V2. Nobody discovers them by accident; read the manual once.
Stereo input needs the rear switch. Plugging a TRS cable into the input does nothing on its own. The rear-panel Input switch must be moved to STEREO. Outputs are stereo regardless; use Out L alone for mono.
The tremolo LED is a rate indicator. It pulses in time with the LFO, which makes setting a tempo by eye genuinely practical in the absence of tap tempo. For actual tap, you need a Strymon TAP Favorite, MiniSwitch or MultiSwitch Plus on the EXP jack.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is the Flint V2 worth upgrading to from the V1?
Only for features, never for sound. The algorithms are unchanged. If you need MIDI, presets, stereo input, adjustable pre-delay, the sub-1 Hz tremolo range or switchable effect order, the upgrade is real. If you do not, the V1 remains a fully current-sounding pedal and the $120 difference buys a lot of something else.
Does the Flint have tap tempo?
Not onboard. Tremolo speed is set by knob, by expression pedal, by MIDI Clock Sync on the V2, or by an external switch on the EXP jack — Strymon’s own TAP Favorite is the intended accessory. The absence of a dedicated tap switch is the most common criticism of the pedal and the main reason some players choose the Walrus Monument instead.
Can the tremolo and reverb be used independently?
Yes. Two footswitches, two independent circuits, either or both. Many owners run the reverb permanently on and use the tremolo as a song-specific effect.
Which reverb mode should I start with?
The ’60s spring, if you are coming from an amp and want the pedal to disappear. The ’70s plate, if you want the reverb to be a texture rather than a room — it is the mode most Flint owners settle on, and it is the one Gary Clark Jr. runs. The ’80s hall is a special-occasion sound.
What is harmonic tremolo actually doing?
Splitting the signal into low and high bands and alternating between them out of phase, rather than turning the whole signal up and down. The result is a modulation of tonal colour rather than volume, which is why slow harmonic tremolo sounds more like a phaser or a vibe than like a chopping tremolo. Fender used it in brownface amps around 1961 and dropped it because it was costly to build.
Does the Flint work for bass or keys?
Yes, and it is used that way. Royal Blood’s Mike Kerr has been photographed with one in a bass rig, and Tycho is logged as a user in an electronic production context. The plate and hall modes in particular are as much studio tools as guitar effects. The ’63 bias tremolo will thin a bass signal at high Intensity; the photocell mode holds low end together better.
How much power does it need?
9V DC centre-negative, 300 mA minimum, from an isolated supply. Not included. This is a genuinely demanding pedal by stompbox standards and it is the number one cause of reported malfunctions.
Is the Flint better than putting a reverb and a tremolo pedal next to each other?
Different, not better. Two dedicated pedals give you more parameters, tap tempo on the tremolo and the ability to place other effects between them. The Flint gives you a single power draw, a single footprint, shared presets on the V2, internal effect-order switching, and a pair of algorithms designed to sit together. It is the amp-channel answer rather than the modular answer.
The Verdict That Isn’t A Review
The Flint’s real achievement is restraint. Six algorithms, nine parameters, two footswitches, no shimmer, no reverse, no granular anything. In a market that has spent a decade adding modes, Strymon shipped a pedal in 2012 with a narrow, opinionated feature set and then, given a decade of technological headroom and a full redesign, declined to widen it. The V2 has better connectivity, a better front end and a handful of parameters that were always missing. It does not have a fourth reverb.
That is why it is still on boards from Russian Circles to Bon Iver to Oasis fourteen years on, and why the discontinued V1 still commands two-thirds of the new price. The Flint is not the most capable reverb pedal you can buy, and it is not the most capable tremolo pedal you can buy. It is the best available answer to a much older question: what did those two knobs on the front of a sixties amp actually sound like, and can I have all three versions?