There is a particular kind of pedal that does not so much add an effect as change what you play. You plug it in intending to audition it for ten minutes, and two hours later you are still sitting there holding one chord, listening to it dissolve, having written nothing and regretted nothing. The Strymon Cloudburst is that pedal. It arrived in January 2023 in a housing barely larger than a Boss compact, at $279, wearing a sky-blue finish and five knobs and one small three-position toggle labelled Ensemble, and it quietly rearranged what people expected a single-algorithm reverb box to be capable of.
What makes the Cloudburst worth an entire article rather than a shrug is that it is not a shrunken BigSky. Strymon did not take their flagship reverb and lop off eleven of its twelve machines. They took one idea — the BigSky’s Cloud algorithm, the most impressionistic and least room-like thing in that pedal — modified it, gave it a Decay knob with an absurd range, and then bolted on a harmonic resynthesis engine that has no real precedent in a guitar reverb. The result behaves less like a reverb and more like an instrument that happens to be triggered by your guitar.
Sound On Sound’s Paul White ended his April 2023 review by admitting he had nailed his credit card to the table to stop himself buying one, and that the nail fell out. That is not typical reviewer language. It tells you something about how this box lands in a room.
Where the Cloudburst Came From
Strymon’s Reverb Lineage, Briefly
Strymon — a division of Damage Control Engineering, based in California — built its reputation on doing one thing at a time with an unreasonable amount of DSP behind it. The blueSky Reverberator arrived as a three-machine reverb (Plate, Room, Spring) with three-way decay and a Shimmer mode, and became the default good reverb on serious pedalboards for the better part of a decade. The BigSky followed with twelve reverb machines, a screen, presets, and a footprint that ate a third of most boards. NightSky came in 2020 and went the other direction entirely — a time-warped reverberator aimed at people who wanted to sculpt reverb like a modular synth rather than dial in a plate.
By the early 2020s, Strymon had a gap. The blueSky was excellent but conventional. The BigSky was comprehensive but large and expensive. NightSky was brilliant but demanded that you learn its language. There was nothing in the line that a player could put on a small board, set once, and use to make the enormous ambient washes that had become the default sound of post-rock, worship guitar, ambient solo performance, and half of modern film scoring.
The Platform Shift
The Cloudburst also marks a hardware generation change. Strymon’s earlier pedals ran on SHARC processors. The Cloudburst — like the v2 revisions of the smaller pedals — runs on a 520MHz ARM superscalar platform with 32-bit floating-point processing and a higher clock rate. That extra headroom is not a spec-sheet flourish. It is precisely what allows the pedal to run an enhanced reverb algorithm and the Ensemble harmonic engine simultaneously, in stereo, in a box this size. The front end is the same discrete Class A JFET input used across the v2 range, chosen to present a guitar with a more amp-like impedance and to keep the playing feel intact before anything gets converted. Conversion is 24-bit/96kHz throughout.
The same generational logic ties the Cloudburst to its stablemates: the El Capistan dTape Echo V2, the Deco V2, and the blueSky V2 all share that platform and that JFET front end. If you already own one of them, the Cloudburst will feel familiar under the hands even though it sounds like nothing else in the range.
What It Actually Does
One Algorithm, Enormous Range
The Cloudburst has exactly one reverb algorithm. This is the fact that makes people dismiss it in forum threads and the fact that makes people keep it for years. The algorithm is a modified descendant of the BigSky’s Cloud machine, and the trick is that turning the Decay knob does not just lengthen the tail — it rewrites numerous internal parameters as it goes, so the character of the space changes continuously across the sweep.
Below noon, Decay produces genuinely convincing small and medium spaces: tight ambience, believable rooms, the kind of thing you would use on a clean rhythm part without anyone identifying it as a reverb pedal. Past noon, the algorithm crosses over into its real territory — long, slow, dense tails that hang rather than ring, decaying so gradually that they function as a bed underneath the playing instead of an effect applied to it. Paul White’s description in Sound On Sound is the best one anyone has written: reverb that behaves as a background sound, and that he could not replicate with any of the other reverb pedals he already owned.
The practical consequence is that the top half of the Decay knob is extremely sensitive. A few degrees of rotation is the difference between a large hall and a note that will still be audible in twelve seconds. Set it with intent.
The Ensemble Engine
Here is the part that has no equivalent elsewhere. The three-position Ensemble toggle — Off, mp, forte — is not a chorus, not a shimmer, and not a pitch shifter. Strymon’s engine splits the incoming signal into 48 frequency bands and generates new harmonics and partials derived from those bands, feeding them into the reverb input. There are hints of octave-up content in there, but what you mostly hear is a dramatic increase in harmonic density: a synthetic, string-section-like body that swells underneath what you played.
Because the generated material is derived from your actual input, the effect tracks everything about your playing. Switch from the neck to the bridge pickup and the Ensemble character changes. Move up the neck and it changes. Dig in harder and it changes. This is the difference between the Cloudburst and a shimmer reverb, which does the same thing to every note regardless. Sound On Sound compared the closest analogous technology to Roland’s HRM harmonic modelling from the Boss SY-series guitar synths and the VG line, which is a fair reference point and a useful one: at short decay settings with Ensemble on forte, the Cloudburst genuinely evokes a Roland GR-300 more than it evokes a reverb.
Add volume swells — from a volume pedal, from your guitar’s volume control, or from a slow-attack pedal — and the illusion becomes complete. Several players have described using the Cloudburst as a pad generator rather than a reverb, and that is a legitimate and intended use.
The Rest of the Controls
Pre-Delay goes far longer than a normal reverb’s pre-delay, to the point where it functions almost as a short delay in series. Paired with a short Decay, it produces a credible slapback. Strymon recommends lower Mix settings when running high Pre-Delay, for the most natural result.
Tone acts like a tilt control: counter-clockwise trims highs for a warm, dark reverb, clockwise adds brightness and crispness. Importantly, it also governs how present the Ensemble effect is, so it doubles as a blend control for the harmonic material.
Mod increases modulation depth across the first half of its travel, then holds depth constant and increases speed across the second half. Around eleven o’clock it adds a fluid, slightly unstable quality to the tails that suits long decays enormously.
Mix runs from fully dry to fully wet, with the 50/50 point at roughly three o’clock — worth knowing, because a lot of people set it at noon and wonder why the pedal sounds subtle. Power-up options add a kill-dry mode for parallel effects loops and an analogue thru-dry path for players who want the dry signal to never touch a converter.
Specifications
Famous Players: What Actually Holds Up
This is the section where gear articles usually go soft. So let us be specific about what is documented and what is merely crowd-sourced, because the two are not the same thing.
Independently Documented
John Mayer is the single best-corroborated Cloudburst user, and the timing is remarkable. When Mayer’s Solo tour opened on 11 March 2023 at the Prudential Center in Newark — a nineteen-arena US run that closed at the Kia Forum in Los Angeles on 14 April — his seated acoustic pedalboard already carried a Cloudburst, a pedal that had been on sale for a matter of weeks. It sat alongside the Midnight-edition Strymon NightSky, an Eventide H90, a Boss RC-500 looper, a TC Electronic Infinite Sample Sustainer and a pair of Boss tuners. Guitar World, MusicRadar and Guitar.com all covered the three-board rig at the time. Tellingly, his standing acoustic board — otherwise similar — dropped the Cloudburst and added a Providence Chrono delay, which suggests the Cloudburst was doing a specific job in the seated set rather than serving as a general-purpose reverb.
That is a genuinely useful data point for anyone assuming this is an ambient-post-rock-only pedal. Mayer put it on an acoustic board, in an arena, next to a NightSky, and used both.
Sammy Duet of Acid Bath is the other well-sourced case, and he could hardly be further from Mayer stylistically. In Premier Guitar’s Acid Bath Rig Rundown, filmed ahead of the band’s show at The Caverns in Grundy County, Tennessee, Duet walks through a board built around a Fortin Roach, a Fortin Zuul noise gate, a high-gain Morley wah, MWK Audio Design Spire, Torture Rack and Stull, an Xotic SP Compressor, and — at roughly the 9:43 mark — a Strymon Cloudburst. Louisiana sludge metal is not the demographic Strymon’s marketing photographs were aimed at, and the fact that the pedal turned up there is worth more than a dozen ambient demo videos.
Vince Gill was documented running a Cloudburst on his 2023 pedalboard during his touring stint with the Eagles, captured in a video screenshot circulated on the Telecaster Discussion Page. Gill is one of the most technically fastidious clean-tone players alive, and if a reverb survives on his board it is because it does not smear the note.
Photographically Sourced but Crowd-Submitted
The following are documented on Equipboard with photographic or video evidence attached, but have not been corroborated by an interview or a magazine rig feature. Treat them as strong indications rather than confirmed endorsements.
Christian Savill of Slowdive appears with a Cloudburst centre-right on a 2023 board photo. If any band has earned the right to a reverb this large, it is the one whose entire catalogue is built on the stuff — though it is worth noting that the sound Slowdive and bandmate Neil Halstead are famous for was made decades earlier on very different hardware, alongside contemporaries like Kevin Shields, and the Cloudburst is a modern addition rather than a historical component of it.
James Munky Shaffer of Korn has been photographed with one on his board for recent tours. Toru Kitajima of Ling Tosite Sigure and AssH of YOASOBI both appear with the pedal in Japanese rig photos — the Cloudburst has landed unusually hard in the Japanese session and J-rock scene. Angel Parra of Los Tres added one to a rebuilt stereo rig. Jeff Hickey of Norma Jean and Bryan Laurenson of Copeland both appear with one, Laurenson’s arriving during Copeland’s 2023 tenth-anniversary Beneath Medicine Tree tour, apparently replacing a Neunaber Immerse.
Seal called it one of his favourite pedals in a 2026 social post — a single-source quote, but a direct one.
A Note on Attribution Honesty
Because the Cloudburst is a 2023 pedal, there is no long tail of classic recordings behind it, and any article claiming otherwise is inventing history. The influence runs the other way: players whose sounds defined big ambient guitar — The Edge, David Gilmour, Jonny Greenwood, Bill Frisell, Nels Cline — built those sounds on entirely different hardware, and none of them is a documented Cloudburst user. They are useful reference points for what the pedal is for, not evidence of who uses it.
Tone Recipes and Settings
Believable Room, Invisible Reverb
Decay 9 o’clock, Pre-Delay 8, Mix 11, Tone 12, Mod off, Ensemble off. This is the setting most Cloudburst owners never find because they bought the pedal for its big sounds. It is a genuinely excellent short ambience — tight, natural, and it sits under a clean rhythm part without announcing itself. If you only ever needed one always-on reverb, this would do.
The Default Ambient Bed
Decay 2 o’clock, Pre-Delay 10, Mix 1, Tone 11, Mod 11, Ensemble mp. Long enough to sustain through a chord change, dark enough not to clutter the top end, with just enough Ensemble to thicken without tipping into synth territory. Play sparse arpeggios and let it fill in the gaps. This is the setting that makes people buy the pedal.
Full String Section
Decay 3 o’clock, Pre-Delay 12, Mix 2, Tone 2, Mod 1, Ensemble forte. Brightness on the Tone knob pushes the Ensemble harmonics forward. Use volume swells — guitar volume knob or pedal — and the attack transient disappears entirely, leaving something that sounds orchestral rather than guitar-like. This is where the pedal stops being a reverb.
Slapback From a Reverb Pedal
Decay 8 o’clock, Pre-Delay 2, Mix 10, Tone 1, Mod off, Ensemble off. The long Pre-Delay range makes this possible. Not a replacement for a proper tape echo like the El Capistan or the Volante, but a genuinely usable rockabilly bounce from a box you already have on the board.
High-Gain Tail Without Mud
Decay 1 o’clock, Pre-Delay 11, Mix 10, Tone 9, Mod off, Ensemble off. Low Mix, dark Tone, no modulation. This is the approach that lets a Cloudburst survive on a sludge or doom board — the tail exists behind the amp rather than in front of it. Run it in an effects loop if you have one, and use the kill-dry power-up option if you are running parallel.
Freeze Pad Under a Solo
Configure the EXP/MIDI jack for Freeze or Infinite mode with a MiniSwitch, then set Decay 3 o’clock, Mix 12, Ensemble mp. Hold a chord, hit the switch, and the tail sustains indefinitely while you play over it without adding further reverb. It is the cheapest one-person-band trick on the market.
Acoustic, Mayer Style
Decay 11 o’clock, Pre-Delay 9, Mix 10, Tone 1, Mod 9, Ensemble off. Bright, short-to-medium, low mix. Acoustic guitars have far more high-frequency content than electrics and need proportionally less reverb; this keeps the body of the instrument intact and adds air rather than space.
All positions given as clock face. Start with Ensemble off and add it last — it is very easy to over-apply.
How It Compares
Cloudburst vs blueSky V2
The most common cross-shop, since they are close in price. The blueSky V2 gives you three distinct machines — Plate, Room, Spring — with Shimmer, and is the better choice if you want a workhorse reverb that covers conventional territory well. The Cloudburst gives you one machine and one very unconventional superpower. If you want the reverb to disappear into the mix, buy the blueSky. If you want the reverb to be a compositional element, buy the Cloudburst.
Cloudburst vs BigSky
The BigSky contains twelve machines, a screen, onboard presets and full stereo routing, and it costs and occupies substantially more. It also contains the Cloud algorithm the Cloudburst descends from — but not the Ensemble engine, which is exclusive to the newer pedal and cannot be had on the BigSky at any price. If you need spring, plate, nonlinear, reflections and everything else in one enclosure, BigSky. If you need one thing done better than the BigSky does it, Cloudburst.
Cloudburst vs Walrus Audio Slo and Fathom
The Walrus Audio Slo is the closest competitor in spirit — three dark, textural modes aimed squarely at ambient players, at a lower price. The Fathom is the more conventional four-mode alternative. Both are excellent and both are cheaper. What neither does is generate new harmonic content that tracks your playing. The Slo’s Dream mode is the nearest thing, and it is a different, more filtered kind of strangeness. Many boards happily carry a Slo and a Cloudburst.
Cloudburst vs Boss RV-500 and Boss RV-6
The Boss RV-500 is the deep-menu, everything-included option — more comprehensive than the Cloudburst by a wide margin, and considerably less immediate. The Boss RV-6 is the sensible, affordable, no-thought-required alternative that does eight good reverbs and gets out of the way. Neither is trying to do what the Cloudburst does.
Cloudburst vs Electro-Harmonix Oceans 11 and Holy Grail Neo
The Oceans 11 is the value benchmark: eleven modes for a fraction of the money, with genuinely good shimmer and polyphonic modes. The Holy Grail Neo is the three-knob classic. If budget is the deciding factor and you mainly want big reverb, the Oceans 11 gets you most of the way for a quarter of the price. The remainder is the Ensemble engine and the quality of the long tails, and whether that is worth the difference is a personal question.
Cloudburst vs Hall of Fame 2, MXR M300 and JHS 3 Series
The Hall of Fame 2 brings TonePrint and the MASH pressure-sensitive footswitch; the MXR M300 is the compact, high-quality, six-mode option beloved of players who want studio-grade reverb without a manual; the JHS 3 Series Reverb is the three-knob budget entry point. All three are more conventional and all three are smaller-ticket. The Cloudburst is the specialist purchase in this company. The Keeley Caverns V2 is a different proposition again, bundling delay and reverb in one enclosure for players short on board space.
In a Full Strymon Board
The Cloudburst plays extremely well with the rest of the range. A common modern rig runs a drive into the Iridium for amp and cab, into the Cloudburst, with a TimeLine or Deco alongside — indeed, Strymon’s own audio demos on the product page are labelled with exactly those chains. The Flint covers vintage tremolo and spring/plate territory the Cloudburst deliberately ignores, and the Mobius handles modulation duties that the Cloudburst’s internal Mod control only gestures at. There is very little overlap in that stack, which is unusual and speaks to how narrowly each pedal is aimed.
Buying Guide
Who Should Buy One
Buy a Cloudburst if you make ambient, post-rock, cinematic, worship or solo-instrumental music and you want one box that both does the reverb and generates the pad. Buy one if you are a looper player who needs a bed to play over. Buy one if you record and want a reverb that goes straight into an interface — the +10dBu input handles line-level signals with care, and the stereo I/O is real. Buy one if you already own a conventional reverb and want the thing your conventional reverb cannot do.
Who Should Not
Do not buy a Cloudburst as your only reverb if what you actually want is a spring tank. It does not do spring. It does not do plate as a distinct voice. It does not do gated or nonlinear reverb. If you play surf, rockabilly, blues or classic rock and you want the reverb to sound like an amp, the Flint or a good spring emulation will serve you far better for less money. Do not buy one expecting deep editability from the front panel either — the depth is real but it lives behind power-up combinations, MIDI, and the Nixie editor.
Price and Availability in 2026
The Cloudburst remains a current product in Strymon’s line as of September 2026, sitting in the reverb category alongside BigSky MX, BigSky, blueSky, Flint and NightSky, and listed as in stock and shipping same or next business day. Street price is unchanged from launch at $279 in the US, with used examples typically starting around $215. That narrow gap between new and used is itself informative: people do not flip these.
There is also a software version. Strymon released the Cloudburst plugin in May 2025 at $79 — described as a direct code port of the hardware, Ensemble engine included. If you are primarily a recording musician, the plugin is a serious alternative and a cheap way to find out whether the Ensemble concept suits your music before committing to the pedal.
What to Check When Buying Used
Check that the recessed mono/stereo toggle on the rear moves cleanly and that the pedal actually passes stereo when set to do so. Confirm the USB-C port enumerates on a computer, since that is your route to firmware updates and the Nixie editor. Ask the seller whether the pedal has been left in a non-default power-up configuration — kill-dry mode in particular will make a pedal appear broken to anyone testing it in a standard mono chain. And confirm the original box, since Strymon does not include a power supply and the enclosure is small enough that shipping damage is a real risk without proper packing.
Ownership Notes
Power it properly. The Cloudburst requires a minimum of 250mA at 9V DC, centre-negative, 2.1mm, and no power supply is included. Do not run it from a daisy chain shared with digital neighbours; give it an isolated output. Strymon’s own Ojai and Zuma supplies exist for exactly this reason, but any decent isolated brick will do.
Bypass mode matters. Out of the box you can choose between hard-wired true bypass and buffered bypass with spillover. Spillover lets the current reverb tail decay naturally when you disengage the pedal or change preset, which is the correct choice for almost anyone using long decays — hitting the footswitch and having a fifteen-second tail vanish instantly is jarring. If you have a strict true-bypass board philosophy, be aware you are giving that up.
Stereo needs the right cables. The in and out jacks are TRS. Stereo operation requires TRS cables or adapters, which are not included, and the rear toggle must be set correctly. A great many complaints about the Cloudburst not working in stereo resolve to a TS cable in a TRS jack.
Expanding it. The single EXP/MIDI jack does a lot of work. It accepts a standard TRS expression pedal, which is the default and morphs between two full sets of knob positions, or a Strymon MiniSwitch or MultiSwitch Plus, or a TRS MIDI connection. Configured for MIDI you get access to 300 presets in three banks and CC control over the parameters. A MultiSwitch Plus gives you three presets underfoot. Choose one function; you cannot have expression and MIDI simultaneously from one jack.
Firmware. Strymon has issued firmware revisions for the Cloudburst since launch and publishes release notes. Updating over USB-C is straightforward, and it is worth doing on a used purchase before you form an opinion of the pedal.
Placement in the chain. Conventional wisdom puts it last, after modulation and delay. Two exceptions are worth trying: running the Cloudburst before a delay produces reverb tails that then repeat, which is either magnificent or a disaster depending on the material; and putting it in an amp’s effects loop keeps the reverb behind the preamp distortion rather than in front of it, which is usually what high-gain players want.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is the Cloudburst just a smaller BigSky?
No. It contains one algorithm derived from the BigSky’s Cloud machine, not twelve, and it contains the Ensemble harmonic engine, which the BigSky does not have and cannot be given. They are different pedals aimed at different jobs. Owning both is not redundant.
Is Ensemble the same as shimmer?
No. Shimmer feeds a pitch-shifted copy of the reverb back into itself, producing a fixed octave-up sheen. Ensemble splits the input into 48 frequency bands and synthesises new harmonics and partials from them, so what it generates depends on what you played, which pickup you used and where on the neck you were. It is closer to harmonic resynthesis than to pitch shifting, and it responds to dynamics in a way shimmer does not.
Can I use the Cloudburst with bass, synth or vocals?
Yes. The input handles signals up to +10dBu, so line-level sources are workable with attention to gain staging, and the stereo I/O makes it usable as an outboard processor. Strymon and reviewers both note it is not a guitar-only device. The Ensemble engine on a synth pad is a genuinely interesting place to spend an afternoon.
Does the Cloudburst have presets?
Not from the front panel in the conventional sense. You get a Favorite switch function via the EXP/MIDI jack, three presets underfoot with a MultiSwitch Plus, and 300 presets in three banks accessible over MIDI. If you want a screen and a preset knob, that is the BigSky’s job.
Do I need an expression pedal or MiniSwitch to get the most out of it?
You do not need one, but Freeze and Infinite modes are among the pedal’s best features and both require an external switch to access. A MiniSwitch is inexpensive and transforms what the Cloudburst can do in a live context.
Is it noisy at long decay settings?
No. The typical signal-to-noise ratio is 116dB and the converters run at 24-bit/96kHz. The far more common complaint is the opposite problem — that long tails plus high Mix will swallow your dry signal if you are not careful, since the 50/50 mix point is at roughly three o’clock rather than noon.
Is the plugin as good as the pedal?
Strymon describe the Cloudburst plugin, released in May 2025 at $79, as a direct code port of the hardware including the Ensemble engine. For recording it is a legitimate substitute. What it cannot give you is the JFET input stage, the physical footswitch, or the pedal in front of an amp on a stage.
Should I get a Cloudburst or a Walrus Slo?
If budget is the constraint, the Slo gets you into dark, textural ambient territory for considerably less money and is a superb pedal in its own right. If the specific thing you want is a responsive synthesised pad that tracks your playing, only the Cloudburst does that, and no amount of tweaking gets another reverb there.