Strymon's TimeLine MX adds a granular delay and runs two engines at once

Strymon has replaced its long-running TimeLine with the TimeLine MX, a $679 pedal carrying eleven delay engines and a new reverb. The part worth knowing is that it runs two of them at once, routed in series, parallel or split, each panned independently, so a delay and a reverb can share a single preset.

Five machines are new: Oil Can, Spectral, Drum, Reverb and MultiTap, with the older TimeLine engines reworked alongside them. Spectral is Strymon’s approach to granular delay, slicing the signal into fragments and applying pitch, reverse, time stretch or filtering, with an adjustable Grain Shape. MultiTap is an eight-tap design with per-tap control over pan, level, feedback, filter type and cutoff frequency, and it can be configured as eight parallel delay lines.

Swell and Duck were separate machines on the original TimeLine. Both are now available on every engine, with Duck holding the repeats back while you play and letting them rise when you stop. There is a five-minute stereo looper that can sit before or after the delays, and its one-button mode works without switching the pedal into looper mode. All jacks are TRS stereo, with selectable configurations for stereo or mono send and return, wet/dry, and wet/dry/wet.

MIDI runs over USB-C, TRS or DIN for preset changes and parameter control, and the looper functions, including reverse, redo and half speed, are reachable without entering looper mode. An expression pedal can be assigned while playing. Strymon says the pedal runs on a tri-core 800 MHz ARM processor.

Producer’s note

Split routing is the setting to learn first. Series stacks both engines into one long tail, which is the obvious move and usually the wrong one. Split feeds each engine its own signal, so you can keep a clean rhythmic delay on one side and put Spectral on the other, and the granular fragments never feed back into the repeats you are keeping time with.