Can You Use a Shimmer Pedal For Doom? —Earthquaker Astral Destiny Review

There are a lot of reverb pedals. To be honest, I can’t tell the difference between most of them, and I’m not a big fan of reverb to begin with. While it’s a necessary effect for producing any professional-sounding track, it’s rarely anything to get excited about. Lately, however, certain pedal makers have been expanding the reverb family tree with all-wet options, plate simulators, and shimmer tones. The Astral Destiny by Earthquaker devices is perhaps the most interesting of these emergences to date.

Features

The Astral destiny is packed with options for shaping your sound. It includes LFO-style depth and rate settings, as well as possibilities for altering your wet-dry mix. There are eight distinct shimmer/reverb settings, and length and stretch features dictate how your sound will decay. 

In the demo below, I include a short clip of a recording in which I used some of the more conservative settings. This pedal can be quite intense when maxed out, so this is how most people are likely to use it in most situations. After, I demo all of the shimmer options on max settings.

The pedal comes with a detailed manual and an impressive range of customization options. As pictured below, the settings include:

• Presets: allows you to save settings and return to them later

• Length: dictates the length of the effect decay

• Modes

  • Abyss: wide reverb effect with no octave

  • Shimmer: reverb with an upper octave

  • Sub: reverb with a lower octave tail

  • Sub Shimmer: both an upper and lower octave tail

  • Astral: upper and lower octave with regenerating reverb tail

  • Ascend: an upper regenerating pitch bend

  • Descend: a lower regenerating pitch bend

  • Cosmos: a regenerating fifth tail

• Depth: changes the effect depth

• Rate: changes the oscillation speed

• Tone: changes the effect expression

• Mix: increases the percent wet

• Stretch: doubles/halves the length and rate — can be held to slow the transition

Can You Use Astral Destiny for Doom?

Atmospheric effects and metal are often mutually exclusive, but plenty of well-known songs build tension with dark, slightly dissonant intros. Others make use of psychedelic, stonerey solos with heavy vibes and reverbs. The Astral Destiny probably isn’t many metal enthusiasts’ first choice for coloring clean segments, but I’ve found it to be an incredibly useful if slightly limited addition to my pedalboard.

When my girlfriend first gave me the pedal, I wasn’t quite sure how I’d incorporate it into a stoner/doom niche. I quickly realized, however, that certain settings combined with fuzz create eerie, almost eastern sounds that fit perfectly with the over-the-top ancient far-east project I was working on.

Some doom with “astral” reverb:

Thoughts

The Astral destiny is an impressive accomplishment that will set the bar for others looking to make unique but usable effects. It’s easy to spend an hour or more just messing around with maxed-out dials on a clean amp. I did find, however, that the majority of the pedal’s settings are essentially unusable for most practical situations.

I can’t imagine, for example, how the dissonant "ascend" and "descend" modes would fit in any kind of music I listen to. Maybe as a weird, dissonant interlude? "Cosmos" was a little much too, though it lends itself to spacey ambient music much better than ascend and descend.

I ended up using "abyss," "sub," and "astral" the most of all sound modes. Abyss is essentially straight reverb and simply takes the place of a pure reverb pedal or dial. Sub is a little more interesting, and astral gives you a Blade Runner kind of rising intensity. 

My main complaint with Astral Destiny is that the mix setting can’t be set to 100% wet — that is, you can’t remove your guitar tone entirely in favor of the extreme, otherworldly effects the pedal offers. This may be frustrating for some users looking to recreate some of the crazy ambient and synth sounds they’ve heard in ‘80s movies or their nostalgic reproductions. 

If you’re fortunate enough to have access to a decent keyboard, plugging the pedal into one does a great job at solving the wet/dry problem. The trouble with using a guitar is that it will always sound like a guitar, and it can’t convey the same ambient, sci-fi associations that a keyboard can. When you use a keyboard, you can completely customize your front end while your pedal takes care of the reverb/shimmer.

Conclusions

I’m sure there are a ton of other ways to make the Astral Destiny sound dark or metal that I haven’t found yet. There are, for example, plenty of ways to sound “cosmic,” but that kind of vibe has never been my thing. If you’re a keyboard player — even a crappy one like I am — you can get a lot of crazy sounds without having to mess around with expensive analog or software replica dials. 

Astral Destiny is currently selling for around 200 bucks. It isn’t the cheapest shimmer/reverb pedal on the market, but it’s far cheaper than the professional-grade multi-effects units you need to create the same tones from scratch. Since it has more versatility than, for example, Catslinbread’s Cloak shimmer pedal, it sits appropriately within the mid-range pedal market. Recommend, but cautiously.

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