Small, inexpensive reverb that doesn't suck, for a live rig. Suggestions?

[TubularCorporation]

I want convulsion reverb.

[TubularCorporation]

Anyhow, I get paid Thursday so that's the day of reverb reckoning, I want to make my choice before then.

[sheatheman]

i have been looking at the HOF for a while. it's a bargain. this vid speaks for itself:

 

 

basically holds its own against the strymon for 1/3 the price (i found it for $120)

 

i would have a bunch of behringers by now, but i bought the compressor pedal from amazon twice and it was defective (as in it did not work at all) twice, so i stopped trying and am wary of them now.

[cthulu nation]

i would agree that the hall of fame is worth it if you have the extra 100 bucks or whatever. . the behringers are made of plastic and of the cheapest components. and like i said, the behringer reverb is really only useable at 100% wet - otherwise its a big tone sucker.

[modey]

I never noticed any quality issues with using dry signal on the behringer reverb. I have 10+ behringer pedals and they've lasted 7–8 years through various rock bands, noise performances, chip shows etc and none of them have broken yet.

 

As a contrast, my digitech guitar multi-fx pedal has required constant maintenance until it finally broke beyond repair a few months ago.

[TubularCorporation]

I would only ever be using it on an aux send but to be honest I'm kind of back where I started on the Microverb, I think. The TC would be great but I have to many other things I need the $100 for more right now.

[TubularCorporation]

Incidentally, by "Microverb" I mean "Microverb II" since it's significantly easier to find and even though it doesn't sound as interesting as the original I think it would be at least as useful for this specific application. "Reverse" reverb is fun but I don't really need it here.

[TubularCorporation]

OTOH, for less money I could make myself a spring reverb. I already have a pretty good compact reverb tank about 8" long and this circuit looks like it could be made for a few dollars and fit into a reasonably small enclosure instead of a eurorack case.

[sheatheman]

i ordered a HOF and it's getting here tomorrow. I'll let you know how it compares to my dep-5

[Entorwellian]

Actually I found the Boss SP-303's onboard reverb to be the best that I've used in the cheaper range. People say it sounds cheap but I think it does a great job of not only doing room simulation but also for ambient landscapes. It's a glorified effect unit with a sampler-sequencer as an added bonus.

 

Also I have the Nanoverb that I got for $50. Its a bit noisy not that good of a module but for the money it hits a good balance of cost vs. features. Crackles when you change the wet/dry mix but the delays and reverbs that it comes with do a good enough job. The chorus kind of sucks on it, however. I find its more better for doing ambient and large chambers than it is to make smaller rooms with clean 'verbage. It does a great job on leads and pads.

[TubularCorporation]

Ended up going a completely different direction and ordered a BYOC Reverb 2 kit.

[Guest skibby]

Ended up going a completely different direction and ordered a BYOC Reverb 2 kit.

 

is it possible to add more reverbs in the box and switch between the different ones?

[TubularCorporation]

I don't think so, but I did just find this:

 

https://woodylaboratories.wordpress.com/2012/03/20/digital-reverb-accutronics-btdr-2h/

 

 

EDIT: only skimmed the link and posted some misinformation, recanted.

 

 

It might be possible to make a circuit based on the information there that could drive either version of the Belton brick and be able to switch between them, and I assume they have different sounds but probably not different enough for that t be worth doing.

 

More useful is the fact that there appear to be three different versions with different decay times, so it should be possible to swap those out for one another, which would mean that with the right switch you could mount all three and make it selectable.

[TubularCorporation]

What's more interesting to me is that these were designed to replace spring reverb tanks as a retrofit in amplifiers, and that makes me wonder if this circuit could be modified t drive an actual spring reverb tank, it would be pretty cool to have the digital reverb for live use but be able to patch in a real spring tank for recording.

[TubularCorporation]

Also I don't know much about electronics but looking at the schematic and comparing it to the sample circuits in the Belton documents it looks like the "dwell" is a simple feedback loop with some kind of buffer. I bet it would be pretty straightforward to add an insert, and that would make it a whole lot more interesting.

[TubularCorporation]

Just finished building that BYOC reverb pedal and I'm pretty impressed so far, quite likely the most convincing spring reverb emulation I've heard. The thing that's really sold me is how realistically it acts in a feedback loop. I can feed it back into itself as hot as my mixer's aux send can g and it doesn't clip or anything, and actually gets into the kind of endless ringing wash that I've never been able to get with anything but a real spring before. Except with a much lower noise floor.

 

Definitely a cool thing and sometime in the next few months I'll probably try to design something that uses one of the bricks with a longer decay, this is the shortest one. Maybe something with all three and some kind of patching matrix to feed them into each other and back into themselves and generally make a big, ambient wash.

 

 

I wouldn't necessarily recommend the BYOC kit for anything but guitar though, since it has the outputs summed to mono. If I could do it again I'd make something stereo from scratch, there are some circuits out there already and it looks like it's easy enough to design around that even someone like me who barely understands how this stuff works could probably figure it out. I'll try to get a simple demo recorded tomorrow.

[Guest skibby]

thanks for reminding me about BYOC, i'm getting ready to build the analog chorus out of whatever components i have lying around, as well as ordering bucket brigade ic's needed. this seems like a really good way to get into tinkering with DIY modular synth stuff.

[TubularCorporation]

I haven't done any proper recording with it, but here are a couple of clips from a long jam that happened last practice when a friend and I were trying out different approaches to syncing out live rigs. He's playing synth leads into a kaoss pad, but everything else is dry except for the BYOC Reverb 2 an a Microlimiter on the stereo buss.

 

https://soundcloud.com/tmoq/sets/byoc-reverb-2-with-dry-kill

 

 

EDIT: the dry kill mod for using it as a send effect is really basic, you just lift one leg of one resistor where the dry and wet signals are summed and add an SPST switch to toggle the dry.

 

If you have the DIY skill to design your own stripboard layout I'd recommend building from scratch rather than going with BYOC, so that you can design a stereo output section instead of summing the two outputs to mono (unless they are identical signals and stereo out is just provided as a convenience, I haven't really looked in to that - even then it would be nice to have, though). I'd also suggest socketing the reverb brick, since there are three different versions with different decay times and it would be fun to swap them out. The BYOC kit came with the shortest one.

[Guest skibby]

i'd like to build a friggin solid state analog reverb out of delays and filters, but first, analog chorus.

[TubularCorporation]

I'm a big Ibanez AD202 fan, I bet if you found some of those Panasonic BBD chips you could make a really nice sounding chorus. IIRC the big deal (besides using three of them) is that they run on 15 volts and current production BBDs run on 5, but I could be totally wrong about that.

[TubularCorporation]

I'm glad I made that pedal because it sounds fantastic, but I don't know how none of us thought of a first generation Kaoss Pad Mini, they sound fine and cost next to nothing these days.

[pcock]

doesnt fit the price range, but i recently picked up an eventide space and its asbolutely beautiful. love it.

[TubularCorporation]

Took the profits from making a custom MIDI/CV controller out of some old organ pedals for a friend and used them to buy a Kaoss Pad Mini for $50. Reverb was already set, but this way I can swap out the Boss RDD-10 from the live rig for something way smaller. That thing is one of my favorite digital delays ever but I'm trying to keep this all as small as I can, and it's pretty big for something that only does one thing.

 

A guy I used to play music with sometimes before he skipped town got a Space a while back and I definitely agree, they're really nice.