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Updated on 12.14.2020
For a wider angle article on reverbs, read our Best Reverb Pedals organized by type. For other types of reverb, we also have these articles: Best Reverbs for Surf Music, Best Ambient/Shoegaze Reverb, Best Hybrid Reverb Pedals; Multi-Mode Reverb Workstations.
A Guide to the Best Spring Reverb Pedals
Reverb is arguably the most useful effect in music, allowing musicians and producers to create a sense of space for individual instruments and entire mixes. Guitarists have been using it since at least the 1950s, when the first standalone spring reverb units began to appear in guitar tube amps. Even if you don’t like your guitar swimming in ambiance, you most likely appreciate the added depth that even a touch of reverb can add to your guitar tone.
The Spring Reverb Variety—How It Works
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Since the late 1930s, reverb has been duplicated in a number of more space-efficient ways, including with metal springs and metal plates. This article will focus on the spring reverb effect, which is based on a design featuring springs in a little tank like the one pictured below. The guitar signal is sent to the springs, which then vibrate. A pickup mounted inside the tank picks up those vibrations and sends them back to your amp, where they’re blended with your signal to generate a sound similar to the natural reverb we experience in an actual room.
These three 9-¼” springs, in this little tank, generate reverb!
The spring reverb is an effect associated with the electric guitar sound of the ’60s, brought to fame, in particular, by surf music, and facilitated by reverb circuits built inside many Fender amps from that decade. The first Fender Reverb Unit was introduced in 1961 and reissued in 2016.
Best Spring Reverb Pedals with actual Springs
Let’s face it: It’s nice to have a range of different reverbs to work with, but for many music styles, a simple spring reverb pedal will suffice. For many years, guitarists could choose from a number of digital spring reverb emulations, but these days several companies are packing real spring units into devices like the Spaceman Orion, the ScreaminFX Uverbia Real Spring and the Demeter Reverbulator RRP1 among others. Granted, they’re large, but if it’s true spring reverb you seek, nothing less will do. Click on the thumbnails to see a video of each pedal.
You can read a more in-depth article on these pedals on this Tone Report piece.
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Best Spring Reverb Pedals without Springs
Humanity seems to have a problem with carrying bulky and heavy stuff. That’s why shortly after the spring reverb became popular, many pedal builders started looking for ways to recreate that sound in a more portable format. They soon found ways to emulate it, first through analog circuits and later through digital ones, which, in recent years, have become more and more realistic and lush sounding.
Here’s an interactive gallery of some of the best analog or digital spring-less pedals emulating spring reverb. This list only includes reverb-only pedals.
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Best Spring Reverb Pedals in Mini Format
For those with space (or budget) issues and simple needs, one of these mini pedals might be also worth a look. Oh, and no, there’s no trace of real springs in these, in case you are wondering…
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Best Spring + Tremolo Pedals [Go HERE for article]
The combination of tremolo and spring reverb is a classic match found in historic tube amps of the ’60s—and countless classic records. Some of the best spring reverb pedals on the market recreate this marriage, so we couldn’t ignore them in this article, even though they are a little more than just “spring reverbs.”
We have a separate article about this, with the Best Tremolo and Reverb Pedal Combos in Mono and Stereo.
Finally, we couldn’t help but award a bonus entry here to the feature-packed Knas Ekdhal Moisturizer spring reverb, which is not exactly a pedal (no footswitch!!!) but can be placed on a board. It’s big, it’s beautiful, and it’s expensive. But it may be just right for you.
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Video Shootouts
- Subdecay Spring Theory vs. J. Rockett Boing vs. Catalinbread Topanga vs. BOSS ’63
- 13 Spring Reverb Shootout by Ryan Lutton
- Real Spring Reverb Shootout: Danelectro vs Spaceman vs ScreaminFX
Article by Christopher Scapelliti and Paolo De Gregorio
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1 comment
hubbard says:
Jun 8, 2020
No TC Electronic Hall of Fame Mini?…..