Strymon La Brea Analog Tape Drive

Another new gem from our friends at Strymon showed up on the doorstep recently, and it’s always a treat to see what new creations they have in store for us, and for the world. Their new-ish Series A collection, which so far includes the Fairfax Class A Output Stage Drive and the Canoga Vintage Silicon Fuzz, continues today with the La Brea Analog Tape Drive. This one fits in with any pedalboard, pushing your amp and overall tone to the sweetest spot possible…with ease, I might add…

The La Brea is a fully analog tape-style drive, inspired by the acclaimed Strymon Deco, delivering the warm, soft-clipping saturation and harmonic richness of vintage tape machines. This pedal includes independent tape saturation and clean circuits for versatile dynamics interaction with added high-frequency shaping. It adds soft-clipping, tape-style saturation. Lower settings add light overdrive and mild taming of transients, while higher levels provide heavy distortion, sustain, and fuzz textures.

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The tape saturation circuit incorporates two cascading tape stages to achieve anything from a light sizzle to massive gain. La Brea features soft-clipping and dynamic frequency response, allowing exceptional clarity and interaction with amps, other pedals, and when rolling back your guitar’s volume. You can blend your clean signal into a saturated tone for added dynamics, or decrease the LEVEL knob to minimum to use the DRY on its own for a cut or clean boost.

An internal switching power supply provides galvanic isolation via a custom transformer, the Discrete Class A signal path and 24V internal voltage make for increased headroom and dynamics, and a high impedance/low noise JFET input and low impedance output ensure perfect integration with any rig or setup. Loving this collection from the Series A pedals from our buddies at Strymon, and especially this La Brea Analog Tape Drive – thanks as always to them for including us in yet another release!! Our demo is up on YouTube as well – head over and hear this bad mamma-jamma in action, cheers!