Strymon from Designa Devices in Hollywood

Strymon is a major sex word in guitar playing.  If you really want to make a fashion statement with your guitar then Strymon devices are the ones you need to use with it.  Get one now, darlings.

Or so they say.

The Strymon devices have all manner of knobs for tweaking any given effect in fantastic and incredible ways.  For example, the tape echo has an adjustment for Tape Age.  (This is really necessary?)

The devices suffer from two fundamental liabilities:

1. All of the Strymon effects boxes are separate which means complex cabling and power supply management.  All stompboxes have this liability and the point is only that Strymon has not solved it.
2. The cost of Strymon devices is stratospheric.  Multiple Strymon single-effect devices (e.g. Reverb, Delay, etc.) cost more than $500 US.

Converse to the second problem, a Boss GT-100 multi-effects device is about $512.  This unit solves multiple problems as it's reasonably-priced and has a very wide range of effects, including a looper.  For the cabling problem, there is one in from the guitar and mono or stereo out to the amplification stage.  Einfach.  (You can run that output directly to a mixer for an RL show and I've done it.)

This is not a sales pitch for a Boss GT-100 as there are some things I like about it and some I don't.  It's also not a critique as the point is only to evaluate your choices carefully rather than getting swept up in the fervor to get the latest equipment.

You really have to be careful with this sort of thing and deliberate hard as you will put a lot of money down when you get this level of device ... and that is only the first problem.  The second is that after paying that much money you will feel compelled to use it.  For example, when jammers get their first wah-wah, suddenly every lead guitar line after that needs wah-wah.  That won't get better as your stompbox patch grows, it will just get more complicated.

As to whether it's better to have a multi-effects device, one of the premises is that single-effects devices are cleaner.  However, that's very unlikely to be true if you use multiple of them to achieve your aggregate sound.  Multiple devices require multiple cable connections and, just as with computer networks, the more connections, the more the noise.  That's almost invariably where the buzzes, etc originate.  (Another is a low-quality power supply.)

I don't think it's likely there's a significant difference in noise and my guess is the multi-effects device would be cleaner anyway due to a much less complex signal path (i.e. it's not going through the input / output stages of multiple devices).  In any case, any difference in noise, apart from that coming from cables, is probably so minor that only dogs can hear it.

As to the suitability for purpose, the single-effect devices are almost all more flexible than the various effects stages of a multi-effects device.  This is why you're paying the big bucks but think hard on it.  That you want one device today won't at all stop you from wanting another one tomorrow and then you're on a path that's too expensive to change.  If anything, getting one device makes it sooner that you will want another one.

A huge advantage to a multi-effects device is that you can save patches which contain the configuration for any given sound.  Maybe one sound needs heavy grunge on the guitar with lots of compression and, etc, etc.  You can save that configuration as a patch and select it easily rather than pressing a series of buttons on multiple stompboxes to accomplish the same thing.

Another quite large advantage of multi-effects devices is that changing the signal path (i.e. the order in which the effects are encountered) is effortless.  You can only do that with a series of single-effect devices by re-cabling it and that's much too time-consuming for live.

I'd be very careful about listening to what the designer kids are saying as they're the same ones who were paying $500 US for blue jeans with holes in them.