A World of Swirl

Strymon heard it on the Lex

Ever since it was introduced decades ago, musicians have looked for ways to incorporate the rotating speaker sound into their music. Popular with organs and guitars, the three-dimensional swirling effect produced by the system makes it a unique tool for adding everything from ambient textures to cyclonic chaos to your instrumentation. The problem with these sought-after speaker systems is two-fold.

Firstly, they are bloody expensive. Any Leslie-styled speaker you’d want to add to your rig is going to cost you… and the price tag will have a comma in it – and sometimes a crooked number before it. Second, they’re bloody heavy! You do not want to be the guy responsible for transporting these beasts. Even the smaller units tip the scale at near 100 pounds. So the appeal of a solid rotating speaker simulator in pedal-form is vast.

Enter the Strymon Lex – a compact rotating speaker simulator that uses the company’s favored SHARC DSP to create the effect. But does the Lex deliver the ethereal, circling sound players desire, or just circle the drain?

The Strymon Lex comes housed in the standard Strymon enclosure – the same as the El Capistan, Blue Sky, Ola and others. It, like the others, also boasts a wealth of controls. The front panel knobs include Fast Rotor Speed, Preamp Drive, Mic Distance and Horn Level. You also have a footswitch to act as a slow/fast toggle (and the brake when you hold it down) and another that is the on/off bypass. But that is not all, like the El Capistan we reviewed previously, the Lex’s front panel knobs have secondary functions too. In the above order, they are Slow Rotor Speed, Cab Direction, Acceleration Time and +/- 6dB Boost/Cut. You access these functions by holding down the slow/fast and bypass footswitches together.

The rear panel of the Lex has four 1/4-inch jacks – Input, Exp, Left Out and Right Out – as well as a 9vDC power jack. The Exp jack allows for use of an expression pedal which you can assign control to any front-panel knob parameter. The Left Out sends the bass rotor signal, while the right sends the treble rotor output. This option allows for an extra speaker cab to be used adding more dimension to the sound.

Let’s take a listen to the Lex in action. We start with the bridge pickup on the Strat and a subtle shimmer that will keep both rotors around noon and Mic Distance close. Predrive Amp also is around noon. Listen for the slow effect first, then the fast effect… followed by the break function.

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You can here the tone get noticeably thicker and swirly when the effect is engaged, and the brake function adds the ability to fade-out as well as fade-in the circling sound. Shifting to the neck pickup, we speed things up a bit by juicing the Fast Rotor Speed. We also add a bit more drive. Listen for the brake effect once again at the end of the clip. You can also hear the effect speed back up at the very end when the brake is disengaged.

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Speeding up the Fast Horn Speed creates a cool ‘shutter’ style effect and pulling the Mic Distance back offers a bit more of a ‘valley’ in the swells. Over to the Les Paul, we dial back the rotor speeds, but crank up almost everything else, including the drive. Clean first, then you get Lex’d… slow, fast, brake.

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The Strymon Lex is a very cool pedal. We didn’t begin to touch on everything you can do with this unit here. We really just scratched the surface. The control and versatility offered is fairly staggering. While it might not be the spot-on Leslie sim many guitarists desire, it gets you in the neighborhood – Heck, even right next door! – at a fraction of the weight… and the price. That’s our opinion anyway… your mileage may vary!

PLEASE NOTE: All YMMV Review clips are played through a Fender ’65 Princeton Reverb RI using Lava Clear Connect cables. No reverb or other effects were added to the clips. Guitars used in this review include a 1979 Gibson Les Paul Custom and a 1998 Fender American Deluxe Stratocaster.