Most reverb pedals are trying to convince you of something. A room. A hall. A plate hanging in a studio basement in 1968. A spring tank rattling inside a blackface Fender. The whole category is built on simulation, on the polite fiction that your amp is somewhere else, somewhere bigger, somewhere with better ceilings.
The Old Blood Noise Endeavors Dark Star does not do that. It has no interest in doing that. Point it at a single note and it will hand you back something that has no acoustic equivalent anywhere on this planet: a slow-blooming, pitch-smeared, bit-rotted cloud that arrives late, hangs around too long, and does not decay so much as it dissolves. Old Blood’s own manual calls it a long-form reverb intended to influence mood, and that is a strange thing for a manufacturer to write about a reverb pedal. It is also completely accurate. The Dark Star is not a space. It is a weather system.
It is also, on paper, one of the least likely cult objects in the modern effects market. Five knobs. One toggle. Two footswitches. A single mono input and a single mono output. No presets, no MIDI, no stereo, no screen, no app. A pedal that would have looked ordinary in 1994. And yet since early 2016 it has turned up on the boards of shoegaze royalty, post-hardcore veterans, ambient YouTubers, a Grammy-nominated harpist, and enough anonymous bedroom producers to keep the used market permanently thin. When Old Blood finally discontinued it, the company did not replace it so much as it rebuilt it three times over — and the original mono box is still the one people hunt for.
This is the story of that pedal: where it came from, what is actually happening inside it, who is genuinely documented using it, how to set it, and whether the version you can still buy is the version you actually want.
Oklahoma, a Shed, and a Company Built on Movie Posters
Old Blood Noise Endeavors is the work of Brady Smith and Seth McCarroll, who met at the University of Oklahoma. In a Q&A with Chicago Music Exchange, Smith dated the seed of the company to long, late-night discussions and gaming sessions early in 2014 about how the two of them would run a pedal business, and dated its actual existence to August 2014, when they released their first pedal, the Black Fountain delay.
Smith’s route into the trade is worth noting because it explains a lot about how OBNE pedals feel. He told CME he started with a couple of BYOC kits specifically to build up enough soldering ability to apply for a pedal-building job at Keeley Electronics, then learned by watching how things were made and how other people modified and built effects from scratch. That is a builder’s education rather than an engineer’s, and it produces a particular sensibility: pedals that are less interested in accuracy than in behaviour.
The company started as two people in a garage shed in Norman, Oklahoma, and now runs out of an Oklahoma City workshop on SW 25th Street. By the time of that CME interview the crew had grown to roughly ten people, with Dan Pechacek and Isaac Nelson in R&D, first-ever pedal builder Kilyn Massey moved over to multimedia work alongside McCarroll, and a build room staffed by Connor Schmigle, Sean Barker and Matt Howard. Enclosures are drilled in-house, sent out for powder coating, screen printed back at the shop, then populated, soldered, tested, backplated and boxed.
Two lines from that interview tell you everything about the house philosophy. The stated mission is “Make art, make noise.” The stated spirit is: “No master. Go faster.”
The other structural fact about OBNE is that the pedals are conceived visually before they are conceived sonically — or at least simultaneously. Smith described the process as searching for a sonic idea, then trying to work out where that sound takes you in a visual way: does it sound like a certain film soundtrack, does it evoke happiness or despair or anxiety. Every OBNE product page reads like a one-paragraph screenplay. The Dark Star’s manual opens with a passage about being adrift in a place where every direction is the horizon, everything is drifting, and you envision your own demise in the flaming fingers of a sun. It is signed off with the company’s standing motto: blood optional, noise required.
That is not marketing garnish. It is the design brief. The Dark Star sounds the way it sounds because someone decided a reverb should feel like heat death.
Early 2016: A Reverb That Went First in the Chain
The Dark Star arrived in early 2016 as a mono pedal in a standard vertical enclosure, wearing artwork by Bay Area illustrator Jon Carling — a detail Old Blood credits on the product page and in the manual, and one of the reasons the pedal has always looked more like a record sleeve than a piece of signal-processing hardware.
The pitch was simple and slightly heretical. Old Blood’s own product copy describes it as a lo-fi reverb aimed at slow attack and pad generation, with three modes that push pitch shifting, delay and bit crushing into the core voice of a long, dark reverb, and a hold switch for infinite trails. Then comes the sentence that reorganised how a lot of players thought about reverb placement: this is a reverb to go first in your signal chain, and almost an instrument of its own.
Reverb goes last. That is the rule everyone learns. Reverb goes at the end of the chain, or in the amp’s effects loop, because reverb is the room and the room happens to your sound after your sound exists. Old Blood put that convention on the table and calmly told you to ignore it. Run the Dark Star first and the reverb stops being the room — it becomes the source. Everything downstream, every overdrive and filter and delay, is then processing a synthetic pad rather than a guitar. That single instruction is why the Dark Star ended up in so many ambient rigs and why it behaves so differently from a Walrus Audio Fathom or a Strymon blueSky, both of which are exceptional at being the room and have no interest in being the source.
Sound On Sound reviewed it in January 2019, with Paul White filing it firmly in the “not as we know it” category and describing it as really a tool for building reverb-based ambient textures to play over or compose with. He drew a comparison to the Electro-Harmonix Oceans 11 and concluded that the EHX was the more refined and polite of the two — and that polite was not what the Dark Star was about. UK price at the time was £199 including VAT; US price was $199.
Specifications
The Power Spec Contradicts Itself — and Both Numbers Are First-Party
This deserves calling out because it will bite someone building a board. The Dark Star manual, in its specification line, states a 46 mA draw. Old Blood’s own current product page for the same pedal says it requires a 9V DC centre-negative 2.1 mm supply capable of 110 mA. Both documents come from the manufacturer. They differ by a factor of well over two.
The sane resolution is the boring one: plan for the larger figure. A supply rail rated at 110 mA or better will run the pedal regardless of which number is correct, whereas a 100 mA isolated output on an older brick might be marginal if the higher figure is the real one. And as with every digital pedal in this weight class, the connector spec matters as much as the current: 2.1 mm, centre negative, isolated if you can manage it. This is the same category of documentation drift that turns up on the Chase Bliss Warped Vinyl HiFi, where the printed manual and the web page also disagree about current. Trust the bigger number, and trust your power supply’s spec sheet over your memory.
The Three Modes, and Why the Toggle Is the Whole Pedal
Underneath everything, the Dark Star is one reverb engine — long, dark, slow to arrive. What the three-position toggle does is decide what gets fed into that engine, or what happens on the way out of it. The dry signal is untouched in all three modes, which is the single most important thing to understand about the pedal: however deranged the wet path becomes, your actual guitar remains legible underneath it.
Pitch
Two pitch-shifted voices feed the reverb, one assigned to CTRL 1 and one to CTRL 2, each continuously variable across a two-octave span from an octave down to an octave up. Because the shifters are continuous rather than quantised to semitones, this mode does three different jobs depending on how far you move the knobs.
Small deviations from centre give you detune — chorus-adjacent thickening in the wet path only, which is a very different effect from a conventional chorus pedal like the Walrus Julia because it never touches the dry. Large symmetrical settings give you the classic shimmer arrangement, one voice up an octave and one down, which is where the Dark Star competes directly with the Strymon Cloudburst and its ensemble voice or the shimmer algorithm on a Strymon BigSky. And moving the knobs while the reverb is decaying gives you something no algorithmic shimmer can: an audible, unquantised pitch slide inside the tail. Sound On Sound’s review singled this out, noting that continuously variable shifting lets you set up detune effects or move the controls during a performance for very psychedelic results.
The shifting is not high-fidelity. Paul White was blunt about that in SOS — the pitch quality is not the best on the planet — but observed that once it has been through the reverb engine it is entirely up to the job of making otherworldly sounds. That is the correct read. The artefacts are the point. If you want clinically clean polyphonic pitch you buy an EHX POG2 or an Eventide PitchFactor. If you want a haunted choir, you buy this.
Delay
Here CTRL 1 becomes delay time and CTRL 2 becomes delay feedback, with the delay sitting in front of the reverb. The manual describes this as one of the softer and more user-friendly settings to be found in an Old Blood pedal, which, coming from this company, reads as a warning label in reverse. It is the mode that makes big things bigger: repeats smearing into a reverb tail that was already long produces decays that run for minutes rather than seconds.
Push feedback to maximum and it self-oscillates, which turns the Dark Star into a drone generator that will happily continue after you have stopped playing. This is also the mode most likely to survive contact with a band. A pre-reverb delay adds density without adding dissonance, which is why it is the one Dark Star setting you can leave on for an entire song without anyone in the rhythm section filing a complaint.
Crush
The reverb signal passes through a bit crusher. CTRL 1 sets pitch across the same octave-down-to-octave-up range, and CTRL 2 sets the sample-rate ratio of the reverb signal. Note what is missing: there is no bit-depth control. SOS flagged this too, observing that there appears to be no way to set the word length, and that CTRL 2 is really reducing the sampling rate — but that the result is unmistakably a deliberate digital distortion of that character.
This is the mode that makes the Dark Star sound like nothing else. Sample-rate reduction on a reverb tail produces aliasing that rises and falls with the decay, so the trail does not just fade — it degrades, picking up a metallic, grainy edge as it goes. White’s verdict was that the bit crusher is perhaps the most creative of the three options, because you can fine-tune the degree of harmonic nastiness so it works with the reverb rather than against it. If you have heard the Chase Bliss Generation Loss MkII and liked what degradation does to a wet signal, Crush mode is the Dark Star’s answer to the same question, arrived at from a completely different direction.
The Reverb Knob Has a Cliff Edge at the Top
Every Dark Star owner discovers this within about four minutes, so it may as well be documented properly. The Reverb control sets decay length in the ordinary way for most of its travel. Around 90% you are into genuinely long sustain. At 100% it stops being a decay control at all and locks whatever note you were playing when you got there, indefinitely.
The part that catches people out is the exit. The manual is explicit: to get the reverb back into the mix you must turn the control back down past the 90% position. Not just below maximum — back down past 90%. Players who nudge the knob a hair off full and wonder why the drone is still going are running into exactly this.
Handled deliberately, it is one of the pedal’s best features. Set Reverb to maximum, play a chord, roll it back — you have an infinite bed you can build over, generated by the same pedal that is processing what you play on top of it. That is a one-pedal version of what people otherwise assemble from an EHX Freeze plus a separate reverb.
Hold: One Footswitch, Two Completely Different Jobs
The right footswitch is momentary, and what it does depends entirely on the position of an internal switch that most owners never open the backplate to find.
That internal switch decides whether the expression jack controls CTRL 1 or the Reverb knob. Factory default is Reverb. The Hold footswitch then maxes out whichever parameter expression is assigned to. So with the default setting, holding the switch freezes the note currently passing through the reverb — a momentary infinite sustain you can stab in and out of without touching a knob. Flip the internal switch to the right, and expression takes over CTRL 1 instead; now Hold slams CTRL 1 to maximum, which in Pitch mode means an instant octave-up jump in one of the two reverb voices, in Delay mode means the longest delay time, and in Crush mode means an octave-up pitch on the crushed signal.
This is the single most under-used feature on the pedal, and it is a genuinely useful FAQ for anyone buying secondhand: if your Hold switch does something other than what you expected, the previous owner moved the internal switch.
Famous Players: What Actually Holds Up
The Dark Star has a real, documented user base, which is not something you can say about every boutique pedal with a cult reputation. It also has the usual layer of unsourced claims floating around forums and aggregator pages. What follows is the list that survives an evidence check, with the strength of each source stated plainly.
Rachel Goswell (Slowdive)
The best name on the list, and the one that makes immediate musical sense. Goswell’s Dark Star is documented by photograph, visible on the second row of her pedalboard, closest to the synth stand. For a band whose entire identity is built on guitars that have stopped sounding like guitars, a reverb designed to run first in the chain and generate pads is close to a perfect fit — and Slowdive’s post-2017 material leans considerably harder on synthetic texture than the band’s early-nineties records did.
A note on evidence: the source here is a photograph, not a filmed rig rundown or an interview, and it does not distinguish which version of the mono Dark Star is on the board. It is solid identification of the pedal, not of the revision. Goswell’s bandmate Neil Halstead has his own gear history worth reading alongside this, though the Dark Star sighting is specifically Goswell’s.
Sarah Lipstate (Noveller)
The most useful entry on the list, because it comes with an explanation of the routing rather than just a photograph. In a Guitar.com interview published in September 2019 — the one built around her work on Iggy Pop’s Free — Lipstate described running a DigiTech FreqOut, a natural feedback generator, dialled fully wet with no dry signal, and then processing that through the Dark Star reverb, which she characterised as a reverb with a bit crusher in it that adds texture and gives an otherworldly sound.
Two things make this the strongest single piece of evidence in the whole article. First, it is the artist’s own words in a published magazine interview, not a caption on a photo. Second, her description is self-identifying: a reverb with a bit crusher inside it, in 2019, is the Old Blood Dark Star. Aggregator entries for this quote carry a contributor’s note admitting they are inferring the brand — but the inference is forced by the description itself, and that is worth stating rather than hiding.
The routing is also instructive. Feedback generator fully wet into a bit-crushing pad reverb is the Dark Star used exactly as Old Blood intended: not as an effect on a guitar, but as a stage in building a sound that has stopped being a guitar. Lipstate is also a documented user of the Red Panda Context, which puts her in the small club of players who have independently arrived at more than one weird American reverb.
Teppei Teranishi and Eddie Breckenridge (Thrice)
Both halves of Thrice’s low-and-mid end have been photographed with one. Teranishi’s is documented via an Instagram post reacting to Old Blood gear; Breckenridge’s Dark Star sits near his Line 6 HX unit on his bass board.
Breckenridge is the more interesting data point of the two, because he is a bassist. A pad reverb with pitch shifting and sample-rate reduction is not obvious bass equipment, and the fact that it earns a slot on a touring bass board is the clearest available evidence that the Dark Star’s dry-signal-untouched architecture actually works below the guitar range. The dry path stays clean and defined; everything strange happens in parallel. That is precisely the design decision that makes it usable on bass, on synth, and — as we will see — on harp.
Evan Patterson (Young Widows, Jaye Jayle)
Patterson’s Dark Star is visible in Premier Guitar’s Rig Rundown with Emma Ruth Rundle, filmed at Nashville’s High Watt during the On Dark Horses tour and published by Chris Kies in January 2019. The pedal appears on Patterson’s board around the 26:37 mark of the video.
An honesty note on sourcing: the written PG article page for that Rundown does not render its gear-list body copy on a cold fetch — it is one of the magazine’s older layouts — so the confirmation here rests on the timestamped video rather than on printed body text. What the article page does carry is an old-blood-noise-endeavors tag in its metadata alongside tags for EarthQuaker, Red Panda, Verellen, Hiwatt and Guild, which independently corroborates that OBNE gear is on one of the two boards in that episode. Rundle herself is more strongly associated with Red Panda gear from the same period; the Dark Star in that Rundown is Patterson’s.
Corey Stroffolino (La Dispute)
Stroffolino discussed the Dark Star roughly six minutes into a Gear Gods rig rundown video, describing it as probably his favourite pedal. Filmed rundown plus an on-camera endorsement from the player is about as good as pedal attribution gets, and it places the Dark Star in a live post-hardcore context rather than a bedroom-ambient one — a useful corrective, because the pedal’s reputation skews heavily toward the latter.
Michael Weiss (mewithoutYou)
Weiss talks about the Dark Star on camera at around 23:06 in a gear video. Same category of evidence as Stroffolino: the player, on video, discussing the specific pedal.
Andy Othling (Lowercase Noises)
Othling is not a household name outside ambient guitar circles, but inside them he is close to a genre standard-bearer, and his documented Dark Star board is the most instructive rig on this list because of what surrounds it: a Telecaster into Benson amplification, with an Chase Bliss MOOD, a Chase Bliss Blooper, a Chase Bliss Generation Loss, the Chase Bliss and Meris CXM 1978, an EHX POG2, a Death By Audio Evil Filter, and Old Blood’s own Signal Blender.
That is a board with no conventional reverb on it at all. The Dark Star and the CXM are the entire wet section, and the Dark Star is doing the pad-generation work that the CXM’s studio-grade room algorithms deliberately do not. It is the clearest single illustration of the argument this article keeps returning to: the Dark Star is not competing with reverb pedals, it is competing with synthesizers.
Emily Hopkins
Hopkins is a harpist, and at 3:43 in one of her demo videos she splits the left and right channels of a stereo source and routes one through a gold Dark Star and the other through a black one. Two mono Dark Stars used as a hand-built stereo pair, on an instrument with no pickup coil and no fretboard.
This is the best available proof that the pedal is not genre-locked or even instrument-locked, and it is also — with hindsight — a very direct explanation of why Old Blood eventually built a stereo version. Players were already assembling one out of two boxes.
Eric Cannata (Young the Giant) and James Duke
Cannata posted a pedalboard on Instagram, built for the band’s ten-year anniversary show, that includes a Dark Star. Duke, a guitarist and composer, has an Instagram post showing his. Both are photographic identifications from the players’ own accounts, which is legitimate but weaker than a filmed rundown, and neither comes with any account of how the pedal is used.
Josh Carter (Phantogram) — Flagged
This one is worth a paragraph of scepticism, because it is exactly the kind of claim that hardens into fact through repetition. The source is an Instagram post in which Carter thanks Old Blood for a hookup and says he cannot wait to dig into the pedals, with a Dark Star among them. That is a photograph of gifted pedals, not documentation of a rig. It confirms that a Dark Star arrived at his door. It does not confirm that it was ever used on a record or a stage.
Aggregator listings of this claim also misname him in the body text, which is a small thing but a reminder of how much of the crowd-sourced gear internet is copied without checking. Listed here for completeness, and flagged.
The Version Problem: Every Name Above Is a Mono Dark Star
One sweep worth doing in a single paragraph. Every documented sighting above dates from the mono Dark Star era — roughly 2016 through the early 2020s — and none of the underlying sources distinguishes the original 2016 pedal from the later V2. The Dark Star Stereo did not arrive until 2023. So while all of these are true Dark Star sightings, none of them is evidence for the stereo pedal currently on sale, and anyone reading a player list as a buying guide for the current model is reading the wrong document. Where a source names only “Dark Star,” this article treats that as identifying the family, not the revision.
What Could Not Be Verified
A number of additional names circulate in forum threads, retailer copy and social-media board photographs. They are not listed here. The standard applied throughout is a dated photograph of a board in a published rundown, a manufacturer artist page, or a direct quote from the player in an interview or on camera. Anything resting on a cropped screenshot, an uncredited repost, or “someone said on a forum” has been left out — not because it is necessarily false, but because a player list is only worth reading if everything on it can be checked.
Tone Recipes: Nine Settings That Actually Do Something
1. The House Sound — Infinite Swell Pad
Mode: Delay. Mix: fully clockwise, 100% wet. Reverb: noon. CTRL 1 and CTRL 2: start fully off, add in small increments. Place the Dark Star first in the chain.
This is the setting Old Blood itself prints in the manual, submitted by a user named Michael from New Jersey, and it is the closest thing the pedal has to a factory preset. His description of the method is the useful part: start with both CTRL knobs all the way off and add a little at a time until it is right for the specific song or part. He also describes using it early in the chain as if it were a volume pedal with extra magic, and pairing it with thick reverb and a reverse delay behind it to bring out its musical side. Start here. Everything else in this list is a departure from it.
2. Frozen Bed, Play Over the Top
Mode: Delay. Mix: 2 o’clock. Reverb: fully clockwise. CTRL 1: 10 o’clock. CTRL 2: 1 o’clock.
Play the chord you want to live inside, let the Reverb knob at maximum lock it, then roll Reverb back past the 90% mark to release. You now have a sustained bed and a live signal running through the same pedal. Works best with the pedal first in the chain so that everything downstream treats the bed and the live playing identically.
3. Shimmer Without the Sparkle
Mode: Pitch. CTRL 1: fully clockwise (octave up). CTRL 2: fully counter-clockwise (octave down). Reverb: 2 o’clock. Mix: 11 o’clock.
The Dark Star’s answer to shimmer, and it is a darker, dirtier one than the algorithmic versions on a Source Audio Ventris or a BigSky. Because both voices go through the same reverb rather than being generated by separate clean shifters, the octave-down voice muddies deliberately and the octave-up voice picks up artefacts. Keep Mix conservative; this one gets silty fast.
4. The Detune Wash
Mode: Pitch. CTRL 1: a hair clockwise of noon. CTRL 2: a hair counter-clockwise of noon. Reverb: 1 o’clock. Mix: 10 o’clock.
Tiny deviations from centre on both voices, which puts the two reverb tails slightly out of tune with each other and with your dry signal. The effect is enormous width without any modulation LFO involved. This is the single most band-friendly setting on the pedal and the one to use if you want the Dark Star audible on a mix without anyone identifying what it is.
5. Vinyl Rot
Mode: Crush. CTRL 1: noon (no pitch shift). CTRL 2: 9 o’clock (heavy sample-rate reduction). Reverb: 3 o’clock. Mix: noon.
Clean dry signal, degraded tail. The aliasing rises as the trail decays, so notes fade into grit rather than into silence. This is the setting people mean when they say the Dark Star sounds like memory. Pair it with a clean amp and let the pedal do all the damage.
6. Sub-Octave Doom Pad
Mode: Crush. CTRL 1: fully counter-clockwise (octave down). CTRL 2: 11 o’clock. Reverb: 3 o’clock. Mix: 1 o’clock.
A crushed octave-down reverb under everything you play. On guitar it produces a fake baritone layer; on bass, per the Breckenridge use case, it produces something closer to a broken organ. Watch your low end — this setting eats headroom in a way that can surprise a front-of-house engineer.
7. Self-Oscillating Drone
Mode: Delay. CTRL 1: 2 o’clock (long delay time). CTRL 2: fully clockwise (maximum feedback). Reverb: 2 o’clock. Mix: fully clockwise.
The pedal runs away and keeps going after you stop. Use the bypass switch as the panic button. This is a composition tool rather than a performance setting, but it is the fastest route to a usable drone bed for recording, and it responds well to being followed by a filter or an EarthQuaker Avalanche Run for further smearing.
8. The Expression Sweep
Internal switch: right (expression controls CTRL 1). Mode: Pitch. CTRL 2: noon. Reverb: 2 o’clock. Mix: 11 o’clock. Expression pedal plugged in.
Now your foot is on a continuously variable pitch shifter that only affects the reverb voice. Sweeping the pedal during a sustained chord gives you a rising or falling ghost line over an unchanged dry signal. It is the closest thing to a DigiTech Whammy that a reverb pedal has any business offering.
9. Reverb Last, For Once
Mode: Pitch. CTRL 1 and CTRL 2: both at noon. Reverb: 11 o’clock. Mix: 9 o’clock. Placed at the end of the chain.
Included because it is worth knowing what the Dark Star does when you obey convention. With both pitch voices centred and Mix low, it becomes a dark, slightly unstable ambience — not a room, still, but a usable always-on wash that sits behind a dirty amp. Less interesting than everything above it on this list, and the setting most Dark Stars spend most of their lives in.
Knob positions are given as clock positions. Mode is the toggle. Where a setting depends on where the pedal sits in the chain, that is stated.
The Dark Star Family: V1, V2, and the Stereo Rebuild
Buying a Dark Star in 2026 means choosing between three quite different pedals that share a name, an artist and a basic philosophy, and almost nothing else.
Dark Star V1 (early 2016)
The original. Five knobs, three modes, two footswitches, and — this is the identifying feature — no expression jack. Secondhand listings routinely describe the V1 as the early-2016 version without an expression port, and that is the fastest way to tell it apart from a V2 in a photograph. If you want the pedal as it was conceived and you do not intend to use expression control, there is no sonic reason to pay more for a later revision.
Dark Star V2
Same core pedal, with two additions that matter more than they sound. Soft-touch switching replaced the mechanical footswitch, which removes the click on engage — significant on a pedal whose entire function is a slow wash where a switch pop is very audible. And the expression jack arrived, along with the internal switch that assigns it to either CTRL 1 or Reverb. Everything in the tone-recipe section above that involves expression control requires a V2.
Dark Star Stereo, also badged V3 (2023)
Not a revision. A ground-up rebuild, released in 2023, at $329 list on Old Blood’s site and a $299 street price when Premier Guitar reviewed it. Ten knobs instead of five. Stereo TRS in and out with analog dry-through and a choice of trails or true bypass. Onboard presets, MIDI control over every element, and expression over every knob.
The single biggest change is conceptual: the three-way mode toggle is gone. Rather than choosing between pitch, delay and crush, the stereo version runs all of them simultaneously as always-available controls. Filter sets a low-pass or high-pass on the reverb only. Pitch 1 and Pitch 2 are independent shifters with a range of minus two octaves to plus two — double the original’s span, and quantised to half steps. Crush introduces either sample-rate reduction or overdrive depending on which way you turn it. Lag adds delay to the reverb. Multiply adds feedback to the whole system. Decay, Volume, Mix and Spread handle the rest, with Spread panning left and right in opposite directions simultaneously. An Aux switch does one of three jobs depending on configuration: sustain trails indefinitely, close the low-pass filter, or set both pitches to plus one octave.
Power requirement jumps to 350 mA — more than triple the mono pedal’s highest stated figure, and a real board-planning consideration. Dimensions are 4.25 inches wide by 5 inches tall by 2 inches deep.
Premier Guitar’s Nick Millevoi reviewed it in March 2025, scored it 4.6 and gave it a Premier Gear award, praising the control set, the range of sounds and the versatility of the filter, and noting as its one drawback that it works best as a stereo effect, which will limit some players. His central framing is the useful one: he describes coming to think of it as a reverb-based synthesizer, where reverb is the jumping-off point for sonic creation rather than the destination. That is the mono Dark Star’s original thesis, given a much larger budget.
One inconsistency worth flagging for anyone reading that review as a manual: its description of the Crush control says counter-clockwise reduces bit rate and then says counter-clockwise applies distortion. Old Blood’s own product copy resolves it — Crush introduces either sample-rate reduction or overdrive, one per direction of travel — so the review has a transposition in it. Trust the manufacturer’s wording on that one control.
Which One
If you want a pad generator to sit first in the chain and you play in mono into one amp, the mono Dark Star is not a compromise — it is arguably the better pedal for that job, because the mode toggle forces a decision and the pedal is faster to set. If you run stereo, need presets, or want the pitch, crush and delay elements available at once rather than in rotation, the Stereo is a genuinely more capable instrument and the extra $120 or so is not hard to justify. What you should not do is buy the Stereo expecting the mono pedal with extra features. They sound related. They do not sound the same.
How It Compares
Versus the Strymon BigSky and Cloudburst
The BigSky is the reference standard for algorithmic reverb quality, and the Cloudburst is its compact ambient descendant. Both are engineered to sound beautiful. The Dark Star is engineered to sound like something is wrong. If your criterion is fidelity, this is not a contest and Strymon wins it. If your criterion is character, the Dark Star does things neither Strymon pedal will do at any setting, and it does them with five knobs instead of a menu.
Versus the Hologram Microcosm
The Hologram Microcosm is the other pedal people reach for when they want a box that generates rather than processes. The Microcosm is granular and rhythmic — it chops your playing into fragments and rebuilds them in time. The Dark Star is continuous and formless. They are complementary rather than competitive, and boards with both are common. If you want the pedal to give you back something with a pulse, buy the Microcosm; if you want a bed with no pulse at all, buy the Dark Star.
Versus the Chase Bliss and Meris CXM 1978
Andy Othling runs both, which tells you they are not doing the same job. The CXM is a digital-rack emulation with genuinely excellent room and plate algorithms — a studio reverb in a pedal. Pair a Dark Star into a CXM and you get the arrangement his board uses: the Dark Star invents the sound, the CXM places it in a space. That is a much better use of two reverb pedals than running two reverbs in series and hoping.
Versus the EHX Oceans 11
Sound On Sound drew this comparison directly in 2019 and reached the obvious conclusion: the Oceans 11 is the more refined and polite pedal. It is also a third of the price and covers eleven conventional reverb types the Dark Star cannot do at all. These two are not alternatives — the Oceans 11 is a reverb pedal and the Dark Star is not, whatever the box says.
Versus the Walrus Slö
The closest genuine competitor at the original price point. The Walrus Slö also targets ambient, modulated, dark reverb, also has a sustain footswitch, and is easier to get a usable sound out of quickly. The Dark Star goes further into unusable territory and is more rewarding when you get there. Slö for a board that needs a great ambient reverb; Dark Star for a board that needs a sound-design tool.
Versus the Chase Bliss Thermae and Habit
Worth mentioning because the audiences overlap almost completely. The Thermae and the Habit approach the same “pedal as instrument” ambition from the delay side and with vastly deeper configurability. The Dark Star’s advantage is speed: five knobs, a toggle, and you are somewhere interesting within a minute. Chase Bliss pedals reward a weekend with the manual. The Dark Star rewards not reading it.
Versus the Red Panda Context 2
The Context 2 is the closest thing to a direct philosophical rival, and it goes the other way: Red Panda’s reference points are rack units, and the Context is at its best when it is being precise about a specific kind of studio artificiality. The Dark Star has no reference point at all. Between them they cover most of what a modern reverb can be, and there is very little overlap.
Buying Guide
Old Blood has discontinued the mono Dark Star. Its own product page states plainly that the pedal is no longer in production through Old Blood Noise Endeavors but remains available through dealers worldwide, and directs buyers to its dealer list. That means new-old-stock is finite and shrinking, and the used market is the realistic route for most people.
Identify the version before you pay. No expression jack means V1. Expression jack plus soft-touch switching means V2. This is visible in any decent listing photograph of the pedal’s top edge, and it is the difference between being able to use the expression-based settings above and not.
Expect a premium. The pedal listed at $199 at launch and $209 at the end. Discontinued cult pedals with an intact reputation do not get cheaper. Anything near the original price is a fair deal; anything below it deserves a question about condition.
Check the internal switch. On a V2, ask the seller, or plan to open the backplate yourself. It ships set to Reverb. If a previous owner moved it to CTRL 1, the Hold footswitch will behave differently from every demo video you have watched.
Budget power correctly. Nine volts DC, 2.1 mm, centre negative, and plan for 110 mA rather than the manual’s 46 mA. If you are considering the Stereo instead, that figure becomes 350 mA and may well decide the question of whether your current supply survives the purchase.
Decide about stereo before you buy, not after. If your rig is stereo, the mono Dark Star will always be a compromise, and two of them — the Emily Hopkins solution — is both expensive and awkward. The Stereo exists for a reason.
Living With It
Chain position is a real decision, not a detail. Old Blood says first. That is the setting the pedal was designed around and the one that produces the sounds in every demo you have heard. But it means the Dark Star’s output is what your overdrives and fuzzes are amplifying, which is dramatic and also very easy to get wrong. If a first-in-chain Dark Star is turning your dirt pedals into mud, the fix is Mix rather than Reverb — pull the wet blend back before you shorten the decay.
The output trim is there for a reason and almost nobody uses it. There is an internal trimpot labelled Output Trim, sitting between the In and Out jacks, and the manual explains its purpose clearly: the pedals ship set for unity gain when engaged, but in some rigs that reads as a perceived volume drop or boost. Right increases the output, left decreases it. If your Dark Star seems to duck the signal when you kick it on, this is a five-minute fix with a small screwdriver, not a fault.
It will not respond to a tuner. True bypass, no buffer, no tuner out. In a long chain the Dark Star contributes nothing to signal integrity and takes nothing away; plan your buffers elsewhere.
The noise floor is honest. A pedal built around bit crushing and long decays is going to have a noise floor, and the Dark Star does. It is not a defect. If it is troubling you, the culprit is almost always Crush mode with CTRL 2 low and Mix high — the same settings that produce the best sound in that mode. Gate it downstream if you must, but be aware that gating a pad reverb tends to remove exactly the part you bought the pedal for.
It is fantastic on things that are not guitars. The documented user base includes a bassist, a harpist, and a great deal of synth use, and the reason is structural: the dry path is untouched in all three modes. Anything with a line-level or instrument-level output will work.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is the Dark Star still in production?
The mono Dark Star is not. Old Blood’s product page states that it is no longer produced in-house but remains available through the company’s worldwide dealer network. The Dark Star Stereo, sometimes badged V3, is the current in-production model and is listed at $329.
What is the difference between the Dark Star V1 and V2?
The V1, from early 2016, has no expression jack. The V2 added an expression input — assignable internally to either CTRL 1 or the Reverb control — and soft-touch switching in place of the original mechanical footswitch. The reverb engine and the three modes are otherwise the same.
How much current does the Dark Star draw?
The manual specifies 46 mA. Old Blood’s product page asks for a supply capable of 110 mA. Both are first-party figures and they disagree, so plan for the larger one. It runs on standard 9V DC, 2.1 mm barrel, centre negative. The Dark Star Stereo requires 350 mA.
Why won’t my reverb come back after I turned the Reverb knob all the way up?
Because you have engaged the infinite hold at 100%, and the manual is specific about the way out: you have to turn the control back down past the 90% position to return the reverb to the mix. Nudging it just off maximum is not enough.
What does the Hold footswitch actually do?
It maxes out whichever parameter is assigned to the expression jack by the internal switch. Set to Reverb — the factory default — it freezes the note currently in the reverb for as long as you hold it. Set to CTRL 1, it slams that control to maximum instead, which means an octave-up jump in Pitch mode, the longest delay time in Delay mode, or an octave-up pitch on the crushed signal in Crush mode.
Should the Dark Star go first or last in my signal chain?
Old Blood recommends first, and that is the placement the pedal was designed around: it stops being a room and becomes a source, with everything downstream processing the pad. Last works and gives you a more conventional, if still very dark, ambience. First is more interesting and harder to control; last is safer and less like the demos.
Does it work on bass, synth or other instruments?
Yes, and there is documented evidence for it — Thrice bassist Eddie Breckenridge carries one on his board, and harpist Emily Hopkins runs two in a hand-built stereo pair. The reason it translates is that the dry signal is completely unaffected in all three modes, so the low end and the note definition survive intact while everything strange happens in the parallel wet path.
Is the Dark Star Stereo just a stereo version of the original?
No. It is a rebuild. The three-position mode toggle is gone entirely, replaced by simultaneous access to filtering, two pitch shifters with a four-octave total range, crush, lag and feedback, plus presets, MIDI, spread and stereo routing. Premier Guitar’s reviewer described it as a reverb-based synthesizer. It is more capable, and it is a different pedal.
Who designed the Dark Star’s artwork?
Jon Carling, a Bay Area illustrator, credited on both the product page and in the manual. Old Blood’s habit of naming its artists is part of the same instinct that makes its product copy read like film synopses.