In the beginning there was simply reverb, a lonely knob on your amp that added more or less of the wet stuff to your guitar tone. Most often, that effect came from spring-reverb tanks mounted inside our amps, or as standalone devices like the Fender Reverb Unit. Later innovations with digital circuitry brought room, slapback, chamber, and hall textures into guitar players' reach in the form of a stompbox or rack unit. Today, however, reverbs have spiked into one of the hottest categories in guitardom, as they reach far deeper into the stratosphere of time and space, thanks to the latest generation of computer chips and processors. Let's explore a few pedals that exemplify this high-tech reverb revolution.
Part of the trend reflects how electronic engineers now port powerful studio reverbs to something the size of a stompbox. Back in 1978, Lexicon released the 224 Digital Reverberator, which became a studio standard, followed a few years later by the Eventide SP 2016. These rack beauties gave recordings a kind of depth beyond mere sweetening. But now you can buy a pedal and bring that monster studio 'verb to your pedalboard. Picture being in a science museum's planetarium and watching the galactic show overhead, while hearing deep, creaking sounds of outer space. That effect is dominating the current reverb revolution, though it's not the only type of reverb making waves.
In 2011, Eventide released its Space pedal, which was a large-footprint box with tremendous spatial power — that's the planetarium effect, for sure. For most guitarists, however, the smaller Eventide Blackhole does nearly the same job, but requiring less real estate on your pedalboard. With just six knobs, Eventide calls it their "Massive Otherworldly Reverberator," which isn't an exaggeration, yet you can also use the mix knob to bring it back to earth and find that kind of studio reverb heard on top-flight albums. Think about those gossamer L.A. recordings of the 1980s and '90s (such as those by Michael Jackson, Quincy Jones, Whitney Houston, Toto, and Michael McDonald), where notes and chords were buffed and polished to perfection. If you're more adventurous and tech-savvy, other Eventide options are their H9 and H90 multi-effects boxes, which contain blackhole reverb and all of their other high-fidelity effects.
Another buzzword is ambient reverb, or sometimes, shimmer reverb. The door to this category was blown open by the Strymon Cloudburst, a striking blue chassis that delivers long, lingering tails like a synthesizer set with slow decay. Unlike a conventional 'verb that adds space and depth, this Strymon has powerful delay, modulation, and pitch-shifting abilities that can conjure a natural, ambient pad without any artificial-sounding gimmicks.
Better yet, the Cloudburst is ridiculously easy to use. Use the Ensemble switch to pick either the moderate or maximum orchestral sounds — or turn it completely off, making it closer to a conventional reverb. Perhaps the most important knob is Mix, determining when you want a little dash of ambient pad behind your guitar, or full "shoegaze" (referring to the 1980s/'90s rock style), taking you to Neverland on a cloud of reverb. Its tones are delicate, gorgeous and, most important, organic. Nothing here sounds like an artificial effect. While digital, the Strymon Cloudburst delivers a living, breathing, almost-celestial reverb.
If you want a huge choice of time-based effects in a guitar-friendly package, the EHX Oceans 11 and Oceans 12 deliver a lot of bang for the buck. There's everything from smaller room and plate sounds to modulation-laced sounds (think tremolo with reverb) or Shim, Poly, and Octave, which add higher- and lower-octave reflections, like 12-string guitar or bass from deep space. Reverse reverb gives you Jimi Hendrix-style reverse-tape effects. Another cool tweak is the Auto Infinite function, which lets you strum a silky chord, which freezes in place until you strum or pick more notes. (EHX also has these infinite reverb sounds in their Freeze pedal. Pink Floydians, take note.)
The Wampler Catacombs is a stereo box that can operate as a floor unit or on a desktop, for deeper studio experimentation. The Catacombs provides that lush reverb you've heard on a million records and soundtracks; it sounds like you're recording in an expensive studio. The hip Shimmer preset gives guitar chords a long sustain, as if the notes are decaying into a Hammond organ or heavenly strings as they fade. It especially scores points by putting both blackhole-style reverb and ambient, shimmering effects into one box, for a super-competitive price.
The Walrus Audio Slö multi-texture reverb is another time-based pedal from beyond the cosmos, at times sounding like a guitar and other times like a keyboard. Like a lot of boxes from this gear generation, there are slow attack and decay settings that emulate orchestral strings or dreamy guitar pastiches. (There's also a larger deluxe version, amusingly called Slöer.)
Jason Stulce, Walrus' lead engineer, says, "Ambient reverbs are near and dear to Walrus Audio's heart. Their feedback networks are designed to produce beautiful, long-lasting pad-like textures without falling apart after many seconds of sustain. We've continued to learn new approaches and improve how we design and tune these algorithms to push the envelope of what ambient reverb can be."
Subtitled a Tri-Dimensional Reverberation Machine, the Earthquaker Ledges has pro-grade sounds, but it also boasts a user-friendly interface with no menus or deep MIDI commands to figure out. The heart of the matter are the Ledge's three reverb modes, offering Room (slapback to mid-sized rooms); Hall (big spaces); and Plate for longer, more reflective reverbs. If you crank up the Length and Mix knobs in Plate, you can get almost infinite repeats for shoegaze and ambient applications. You can even turn off the pedal and solo over this endless tail. Another important perk is that the footswitch doesn't chop the tails off, so you can enjoy a natural reverb decay if you jump to another effect.
The Pigtronix Cosmosis is a deep, fascinating device billed as a "stereo ambient reverb with morphing." The actual Morph feature allows you to naturally transition from one reverb to another, generating otherworldly soundscapes to explore. The fun part is just plugging in and letting the Cosmosis do its thing. The unit is designed for real-time tweaking, so twiddle knobs as you search for an organic dimension: in essence, you can "perform" with this pedal.
Dave Koltai, chief technology officer of Pigtronix, adds, "The Cosmosis is our contribution to the world of ambient reverb effects. The mesmerizing synthesizer-pad sounds in this pedal are created using a 32-bit, floating-point algorithm that plots many thousands of discrete delays. This approach allows for a super-smooth pad that reverberates only the harmonics of what you played, while avoiding harsh, high-frequency artifacts typically associated with this type of processing."
There are other reverbs than the ambient types.
The Keeley Zoma is a groovy unit that brings together spring and plate reverb with the surfy '60s sounds of tremolo and vibrato with amazing authenticity — you'll think you've plugged into a vintage Fender black-panel amp.
Robert Keeley of Keeley Electronics says, "The need for long delay trails with sublime modulation has been answered for us at Keeley Electronics with the Dream 5504 DSP chip. My software engineer Aaron Tackett told me, 'The Dream has allowed for more/longer delay buffers and greater control over how to read and write to them. This combined with a greater flexibility with oscillators and filtering allows for a broader palette to work with.' Our customers are giving our latest reverb, the Keeley Zoma, rave reviews and telling me that it's very life-like. It has zero digital artifacts in the mix and that the modulation in stereo is amazing."
Despite all the digital advances, do you remain a devoted analog devotee? The Gamechanger Light is an all-analog pedal containing a genuine yet compact spring tank and is adept at conjuring spacey shoegazer sounds. The box further uses optical sensors, adding another wrinkle to the equation. Without getting overly technical, the Latvia-made Light takes the incoming guitar signal (voltage) and converts it into mechanical vibrations that travel down the springs before being converted back to good ol' voltage. In addition, infrared optical sensors grab even more overtones and harmonics from each spring's vibration and add it into the overall reverb picture, offering a broader palette of sounds. In use, the Light Pedal sounds way more esoteric than a generic reverb, notably its big trails and overtones. It's warm, old-school analog reverb, but shrunk down to a floor-pedal size. Hip on both guitars or keyboards.
By now, your head may be reeling trying to decide the best new reverb for you, but if you watch a few pedal demos on YouTube, you'll get a feel for the fresh chip technology. Instead of that lonely 'ol knob on your amp, today's reverb is a powerful tool that can be as simple or as complex as you want it. Either way, your guitar playing may never be the same. TQ—Pete Prown