Got last two pedals for 10 pedal pedalboard on Friday. Had some extra money and decided to get new reverbs and delays I can be happy with. I wasn’t too happy with old ones. Delays didn’t have dedicated tap tempo and lacked controls. All had some kind of tap tempo but you had to do something to get it. If there was enough control it was hidden in secondary functions. Reverbs had same problem. Either not enough control or I just didn’t like their sound. I was happy with all the other pedals. All the other ones being analog pedals (at least as far as I know) . Reverbs and delays were older digital pedals. On quick search each of those are discontinues or not available for other reasons.
I started to wonder if there is pedal with real spring reverb. I don’t mean emulation. I mean real spring. There are few of those. Surfy Industries seem to make the best ones. Based on videos I have seen only ones giving anything close to that legendary spring reverbs sound. Surfybear Compact wasn’t too expensive. Ordered one of those. It is really worth the money if you want real spring reverb sound. Some say bigger units sound better but I love the sound of compact. It gives you authentic surf and Ennio Morricone’s spaghetti western guitar sounds.
Then I started to wonder if I should have all analog pedal board. Analog delays are not as rare as real spring reverb pedals. Got two of those because you need to stack delays sometimes. All analog pedalboard plan went away when I learned about Walrus Audio’s R1’s swell function. It does automatic volume swells and it works on every mode. Some other pedals had special mode for it and you had to have pedal set to 100% wet. Not R1. Got one of those too.
I don’t normally buy this many pedals. This was special case. I want to have pedalboard where I don’t have change pedals. Don’t want to keep searching for next interesting pedal. Just want to have pedalboard which does what I want. I can almost have that with 10 pedals I got now. Power supply sets the limit to ten. I can expand it by five and then another five if I need. Checked 10 pedals I got would fit pedalboard I planned to get. Have to wait for it for at least two months if I buy it. But that is another problem.
Problem is those 10 pedals don’t have high gain distortion. I thought I could do without it until I played with Revv G3. My Revv G3. Already have it. I could take something else away and put G3 but then I would miss something else. Turns out my do everything board needs at least 11 pedals. Gate would be nice with G3 so that makes 12 pedals. Could have my both fuzzes there if I have power supply extension. Wouldn’t make much sense since both sound so similar but I could do it. Maybe digital delay for brighter delay would be nice too. That would make it to 14 pedals.
I could swap between Revv G2 and Revv G3 but I want to have pedalboard where I don’t change pedals. 10 pedals would be fine if I used only single coils. With those noise becomes problem before full gain. Probably gate would be nice there but I get good sounds with single coils before noise becomes problem.