The best pedals for ambient music, from space-warping reverbs to experimental micro-loopers
Looking to create some space? These are the best pedals for big ambience, mind-melting delays and glitchy soundscapes.
Image: Strymon
When you think about it, all guitar music has an ambience. It comes from the tone of the instrument, how you play it, and the effects that you apply to your signal.
Ambient pedals radically shift that mood by playing around with the sense of time and space. In practical terms, this means they add delay or reverb, often in unusual forms or with other ear-pleasing effects added into the mix.
Naturally, you can use these pedals for composing ambient music, layering sound to create something more atmospheric and textural than mere notes and chords. It’s what Jónsi from Sigur Rós would do. A note’s attack can be hidden by EQ-ing out high end, or by rolling up your volume control (or a volume pedal) after strumming to create swells. Sustain can be extended ‘naturally’ with overdrive, distortion or harmonic feedback, but delays and reverbs also extend a note or chord, and can offer some interesting ways to manipulate it. In this context, too, delays and reverbs are often favoured for their cleaner, less abrasive approach to creating sustain.
Whichever band of the ambient spectrum resonates with you, the tried-and-tested pedals reviewed below will give you scope to create and transform.
The best pedals for ambient music, at a glance:
- Our Pick: Walrus Audio Fundamental Ambient
- Best compact ambient delay: MXR Joshua
- Best workstation ambient delay: Meris LVX
- Best compact ambient reverb: Strymon Cloudburst
- Best compact soundscaper: Walrus Audio Lore
- Best character reverb: Earthquaker Devices Afterneath V3
- Best pad generator pedal: Chase Bliss Onward
- Best synth-style ambient reverb: Meris MercuryX
- Best workstation ambient reverb: Strymon BigSkyMX
- Best stereo ambient reverb: Walrus Audio Slöer
- Best experimental ambient pedal: Chase Bliss Mood MkII
- Why you can trust Guitar.com
Our Pick: Walrus Audio Fundamental Ambient
Ambience can act as the foundation of a composition or ‘wet’ guitar sound, providing a textural backdrop to your playing. Rated 10/10 in our ears-on testing, the Fundamental Ambient from Walrus Audio is the one pedal we’d recommend above all others to add that rich, compelling context.
Above all, this pedal gives you the boutique big-box sounds of something like the Strymon Cloudburst at a third of the price. There are three outstanding reverbs to explore – the moody, down-octave-laced ‘Deep’; the sustain-drenched ‘Lush’; and a more experimental option called ‘Haze’, which combines distortion, sample rate reduction and resonant bandpass tone control. You have incredible potential to create light, shade and depth via the pedal’s slider controls.
Need more? Read our Walrus Audio Fundamental Ambient review.
Best compact ambient delay: MXR Joshua
It’s a mixed blessing to own a 1980s rackmount delay unit. There’s a good chance it’ll sound exceptional – but how are you going to store and transport the unit, without a massive 80s hairdo within which to stow it?
The MXR Joshua seeks to give you the best of both worlds, racking up a motley crew of authentic 1980s delay tones in a great-sounding, feature-packed pedal that’s just as neatly proportioned as most other MXR effects.
Sure, the Joshua’s highly musical repeats lend themselves well to U2-like walls of chiming sound – but there’s plenty here for other ambient experimentalists too, including options to modulate, syncopate and add octaves to your signal.
Need more? Read our MXR Joshua review.
Best workstation ambient delay: Meris LVX
The Meris LVX pushes the boundaries of what a delay pedal can be, with a modular design that empowers you to craft your own delays – or modify any of 81 excellent presets through adjusting the delay, preamp, dynamics, filtering and modulation.
The limits to what you can do with this delay are set by your own appetite for sonic exploration, as much as by the pedal’s own limitations. It’s a major investment, but you’re getting unrivalled scope and control, made accessible by an excellent integrated screen and on-pedal controls. From woozy, lo-fi granulation to ethereal post-rock sound-scaping, this box contains multitudes
Need more? Read our Meris LVX review.
Best compact ambient reverb: Strymon Cloudburst
The ‘Clouds’ algorithm from the Strymon BigSky is one of the defining guitar effects of our times, with a textural, heavily modulated sound that’s added atmosphere to countless discerning pedalboards.
Thanks to the smaller, more affordably priced Cloudburst, that celestial tone is now accessible to guitarists who have a lower (i.e. normal) level of disposable income. More than a mere ‘lite’ version, this pedal gives you something new: a gorgeous ‘Ensemble’ reverb mode that adds harmonics to your signal.
We were particularly impressed with the Cloudburst’s controls, which are both comprehensive and sensitively designed. For instance, the decay knob takes you all the way from subtle, spring-like reverb to a stratospheric post-rock drench, subtly adjusting other parameters as you turn the dial.
Need more? Read our Strymon Cloudburst review.
Best compact soundscaper: Walrus Audio Lore
Want to take your guitar sound somewhere new? The Walrus Audio Lore will help you do it. This pedal is heavy on sonic manipulation, meaning you can pretty much transform three notes into a whole Brian Eno album – and wouldn’t he just love that?
Touted as a ‘reverse soundscape generator’, the Lore lets you play around with five different combinations of reverb and delay, with a heavy focus on reverse delay and pitch manipulation. Essentially, you can switch between a bunch of fantastic, out-there sounds at the turn of a rotary dial.
At its best when pushed to the max, this is an ambient pedal for musicians who’ll gamely step into an otherworld of cascading sound.
Need more? Read our Walrus Audio Lore review.
Best character reverb: Earthquaker Devices Afterneath V3
You can always count on Earthquaker Devices to serve up distinctive sounds. The Afterneath V3 is their unique take on reverb, with a cavernous, shoegazey character, and featuring a very cool pitch-bending sample rate change control.
This third iteration of the Afterneath expands on the functionality of its cult-fave predecessors, with an expression pedal input enabling you to plug in and dynamically control its effects – a major level up for its musicality.
Even if you don’t have an expression pedal, the V3 has plenty to offer, with an exceptionally odd cache of sounds – from ecstatic note sweeps to glitchy arpeggiation – that will bejewel your playing like the rarest of auditory gems.
Need more? Read our Earthquaker Devices Afterneath V3 review.
Best pad generator pedal: Chase Bliss Onward
If you love Chase Bliss, you’ll love the weird, reactive freeze machine that is the Onward. Essentially, this is a multi-mode granular sampler that cooks up some beautiful ambient sounds, and gives you highly musical options to freeze them (so your signal is sustained in pad-like fashion) or glitch them via footswitch. Wrong-sounding sounds never sounded so right – or so at home in up-tempo genres like indie and post-punk.
Despite its out-there capabilities, we reckon this is Chase Bliss’s most accessible pedal yet, with most of its many settings (such as mono input → stereo output) selectable via a simple on/off switch.
Need more? Read our Chase Bliss Onward review.
Best synth-style ambient reverb: Meris MercuryX
After testing the swanky Meris MercuryX big-box, our reviewer concluded that this is one of the most creative and expressive reverb pedals ever made.
Its octet of custom reverbs delivers expansive, synth-style sounds that conjure up the cosmic, and some of which sound totally and fantastically sci-fi. ‘Spectrum Shift’ is one of the most beautiful hi-fi shimmers we’ve ever come across, while ‘Amp Room’ is an uncanny simulation of an amp sound bouncing around a – you guessed it – room.
Any spacefarer needs dependable navigation, and the MercuryX is stellar on that score, with a simple, manageable layout and integrated LCD display.
Need more? Read our Meris MercuryX review.
Best workstation ambient reverb: Strymon BigSky MX
Creating an even more expansive horizon than the original, the BigSky MX is a comprehensive revamp and expansion on Strymon’s world-moving big box.
With our ambient hats jauntily cocked atop our heads, we’d say the most significant upgrade here is the MX’s capability to run two reverb algorithms at once, routed in series, parallel or split. This gives you the scope to arrange those classic BigSky reverb sounds into new and idiosyncratic constellations.
It’s a little cleaner cut and more utopic than, say, the Meris MercuryX, but the BigSky MX is a powerful, premium option to flavour your guitar sound with the infinite.
Need more? Read our Strymon BigSkyMX review.
Best stereo ambient reverb: Walrus Audio Slöer
Stereo sound is a superb tool for creating ambience – especially in the studio – and the Walrus Audio Slöer is one of our favourite pedals that’s equipped with this immersive capability. It’s essentially a top-notch stereo version of a Walrus Audio delay that you might already know and love: the Slö.
But while the textural ambient reverb sounds here are as Slö as they come, there are also some novel possibilities to explore, including a width control that adjusts the stereo output, a stretch slider that lowers the sample rate while lengthening the reverb time, and two new reverb algorithms: ‘Light’ and ‘Rain’.
Need more? Read our Walrus Audio Slöer review.
Best experimental ambient pedal: Chase Bliss Mood MkII
What is this we have before us? ‘An interactive, pseudo-looper thing’ is pretty much as far as our powers of description will take us. The Mood MkII is a wonderfully eccentric pedal that’s much vaunted in weirdo ambient noisemaking circles – and totally irrelevant to most ‘mainstream’ guitarists.
This is not so much an effects pedal as it is an experimental instrument, capable of producing the most cinematic of loop-scapes through colliding and interlacing delay, reverb, looping and stereo. There are seemingly endless features and controls to tweak, including MIDI input, arpeggiation, pitch and speed manipulation. It’s an exquisite thing: the ambient musician’s ambient pedal.
Need more? Read our Chase Bliss Mood MkII review.
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