Possibly the most ramshackle reverb unit in the world.
God this took forever. So, about three months ago I devised the brilliant notion of using an actual spring reverb. At the time I was faffing around with a Strymon Flint and an EQ pedal to achieve that drippy, splashy reverb I’m so bloody fond of. It worked – don’t look so surprised – but at the cost of ear bleeding treble. I made a lot of sound engineers shit lists in that period. And that was just my personality.
But wait, let me first bore you with the whole spring reverb point! Are you sitting comfortably? Tough. So, in 196sometime or other, Fender were developing a spring reverb pan for Hammond (the organ makers), then something else happened, Dick Dale showed up and they eventually created an outboard spring reverb unit. Ok, so some of the details escape me. Spring reverb is (to my mind) essential for surf rock; running a guitar signal through a long set of springs creates a ‘watery’ sound. Remember, surf rock aims to replicate the sound of the sea.
By palm muting the guitar strings, you can achieve drip, splash and trickling sound effects. It’s cool, addictive and heinously simple. Maximum authenticity tells you to use a Fender outboard reverb tank, effectively a valve amp head that powers a long spring pan. Two problems though…1) That’s one more amp head to carry around than you really need to and 2) Silly expensive – they are not widely available in Europe (despite that whole world free trade agreement thing in the 80’s) so second hand units are as rare as hens teeth. So that idea was sunk. Not actually aiming to do surf / water related puns, that just kind of slipped out.
You want it? Dig deep, sucker.
Anyways! Back to now. The Flint is an excellent pedal: but, no matter how impressive Strymons boffins are, it is still digital architecture. Which means it hates distortion, which means sound engineers hate me and I, in turn, end up hating myself. Over on the forums at SG101 (where else?) I was bugging other members about how to remedy the harsh sounding reverb whilst maintaining drip. This ended up with them nagging me to pull the trigger on a Surfy Bear Fet Reverb kit. I folded like laundry to peer pressure and ordered one.
I went for the pre wired option because I am stone cold awful at wiring circuits and pretty lazy to boot. It turned up. Unfortunately, I was about to go up a mountain on some corporate retreat thing for a week, so no spring reverberating for me quite just yet. I headed off into the wild, learned a bit about myself, constantly got asked by other people in my group what surf rock was and came back…well, pretty much the same, really.
Not quite as fully assembled as I would have liked.
I earmarked the Saturday to build my unit. Here was the original plan: I would use an 8″ spring pan I had cannibalised from an old amp, the enclosure would be a small wooden crate that my Electro Harmonix Polychorus came in (mind EHX used to put all their pedals in wooden crates? Wasn’t that cute? I really wish they still would) and I would stuff everything in there. It would be compact, powerful and extra absorbent for all that splashy wetness sloshing around inside. Like a tampon, if you will. What an unfortunate analogy.
Box Wars
Off we go. The enclosure for the circuit has to be metal so as to shield it. Last I checked, of course, wood wasn’t metal. But tinfoil is close enough, so glued loads of it to the interior:
DIY shielding. Bacofoil, no less – only the good stuff here.
That was good fun. I remember literally laughing to myself whilst doing it. Next, the bit I was dreading – wiring the connectors up to the reverb circuit board. Now, remember I had just gotten back from my corporate retreat? There were a lot of activities and sessions, what have you…and some intense after hour drinking sessions. I had been ‘on it’ heavily for the past four days at that point and was, to all extents and purposes, a hot mess come Saturday morning. What I am driving at here is never, ever, attempt to solder fiddly little wires when you have the shakes real bad. What should have been an hour long task stretched out into about 6 all in. I was almost in tears at one point.
But I am nothing if not persevering, so voila:
Look at that, says ‘Surfy Bear’ and everything
Doesn’t it look all neat and colourful?
That’s a handsome reverb circuit right there. But beauty is only skin deep, let’s plug it in and see how it sounds.
And of course, at this point here was the screw up: no sound. Nothing, nada, zip. Something somewhere had a bad connection, and my absolute lack of electrical knowledge means I am about as helpful in this situation as a can of petrol in a house fire.
Those rotten SG101’ers. They repeatedly told me this was a simple project, nothing could go wrong. Never trust surf guitarists.
At that point I had to dash off to a Full Moon Freaks practice, so bundled it all in the crate figuring I would sort it out later. Time passed, and things went about their way. I started trimming my beard more often, learned how to make ramen, learned how to play the drums, debuted Surf Manchu, pretty sure I started getting shorter. I hadn’t actually measured my self in years. I don’t suppose you really have to after a certain age. All the while, the Fet Reverb was locked away in a – figuratively speaking – tiny wooden coffin.
Until…one thing I did do was go to the Surfer Joe festival and came back throbbing and bubbling about spring reverb. All the bands playing were using outboard tanks, and it sounded incredible. Very three dimensional sounding, thick, twangy, full…lush…god, I could go on. It all reminded me of my failed attempt – so let’s get fixing it. Luckily for me, when I am utterly useless at something, I usually know someone who is excellent at it. My good pal Eddie C very kindly had a look at the board and did the sensible thing – removed all my wiring and just did it himself. Of course, he did a sterling job and it was working!
Still had to finish the enclosure though. So fixed the pan in there, and made various holes to put controls through, etc:
Spring locked in
However, it was getting a bit cosy in there once the circuit and wires were in. Also, the short pan was fine and compact, but I started to realise that if I was doing this I may as well go hell for leather. So I scrapped the ‘reverb in a box’ concept and ordered a whopping 17 incher of a spring pan. Who doesn’t love a big 17″, right? That’s going to need a big box, or we can simply BOLT IT TO AN OLD PEDALBOARD AND JUST HAVE THE REVERB CIRCUIT IN A PEDAL ENCLOSURE. Are you getting excited by my feverish wild eyed ideas!?
Never liked that pedal much anyways
I had a Joyo ‘Voodo Octave’ pedal lying around that I had previously attempted to mod (botched that one too) which had lots of holes in it; ideal for the multitude of controls, wires and other random things that seemed to poking out of the circuit. Stripped the pedal down, stuffed the circuit in it and – oh, my favourite bit – finished:
I’m going to paint it some day.
Well, not quite finished: I’ve not even labelled the controls for a start, and would like to paint it. Might do a wave using the ram head as a guide. Hopefully won’t screw that bit up. So, to wit: the spring pan is screwed to the pedal board, and the RCA connectors run out from the pedal into it. And it sounds great. It’s all a bit ramshackle, but that adds a certain charm to it. Fuzz sounds remarkable (I am really running up the gushing praise in this post) through it – squelchy and thick, none of the ice pick highs experienced previously. It’s quite gain-y…having not ever used a valve reverb tank I’m unsure if this is a characteristic. But, it does add a nice level of hair to things And it drips and splashes and trickles. Interestingly, I note that it does it more at higher volumes on the amp. Possibly certain frequencies are been being boosted at higher levels.
And you can ‘crash’ it – this is where you give the pan a good kick and the springs rattle around creating a thunderous sound. It’s a neat, silly trick and I could spend hours doing it. And that is because my life can be quite empty sometimes. Do as I say, not as I do.
Here are some brief samples. They are brief from necessity as I have a sneaking suspicion that my neighbours don’t quite enjoy reverb splash to the same degree I do. The overdrive is from an EHX Soul Food and the fuzz is (of course) the excellent and brutal Death By Audio Fuzz War.
Three months that took. Three months. Sake man.
experimentsinterror 