A spacious reverb that spans low-key plate and demented, enormous cosmic reverb colors is a gas to use and easy to own.
Fun to use. Wide spectrum of sounds. Nice build quality at a great price
Can be hard to remove high harmonic content at all but the least trebly tone settings.
$129
Walrus Fundamental Ambient
walrusaudio.com
With variable voices, accessible prices ranging from 99 to 129 bucks, and slide controls that evoke old synths and vintage Jen pedals, Walrus Audio’s Fundamental series effects are functional, stylish, and dish a lot of awesome sounds at a nice price. The newest addition to the Fundamental series, the Ambient, will be good news for budget-constrained atmospheric musicians that otherwise settle for less-durable pedals at the market’s most inexpensive extremes. Some of those pedals are pretty cool, but the Walrus’ construction quality, sense of substance, and function—which is flat-out fun—make it a substantial alternative to those entry-level artifacts for a minor additional investment. It puts a super-wide range of sounds at your disposal, too.
Though few may use Ambient in subtle applications, it is capable of nice sounds on that spectrum. By using the lowest mix, tone, and decay settings, you can create an appealing facsimile of studio plate reverb that isn’t slathered in cloying top-end harmonics—particularly in the deep mode (which adds low octave) and the sustain-rich lush setting. At advanced mix and decay settings, the Ambient can sound colossal, alien, and unreal in ways any serious sound designer would be happy to explore. Haze mode, which uses sample rate reduction to create grainier, fractured, lo-fi pictures, is its own awesomely weird animal. You can fashion outsized dream-pop textures, or, at the most extreme level and mix settings, use the tone slider in crossfade fashion to conjure scuzzy VHS horror tones that, frankly, freaked me out as I was playing them.
Borrowing a few tricks from the Boss CE-2 makes this very evolved, sweet, and fat BBD chorus a modulation star.
Intoxicating modulations. Capable of great subtlety. Thoughtful, high-quality construction.
Maybe a touch spendy for a simple BBD chorus?
$219
Mythos Fates
mythospedals.com
Wondering how to get me to buy a pedal on looks alone? Well, Mythos’ The Fates chorus is a fine place to start. Blue Hammerite paint, chunky enclosure, Ampeg Daka Ware-style chicken head knobs—basically the stompbox equivalent of a clean, stock ’61 Ford Falcon. Yum. You know what else is tasty? The fat and creamy modulations from this unit.
Mythos makes no secret of the ways the Fates’ design is rooted in the Boss CE-2, and that’s fine by me. My friend’s CE-2 is the pedal that broke my anti-chorus bias. I’d venture that the Mythos is every bit as rich as that O.G. CE-2. But Mythos added two important features—increased depth range, and a vibrato, which, as an EHX Deluxe Memory Man devotee, delights me to no end. The Fates excels at every one of my favorite chorus applications. Paired with an electric 12-string, it can either add near-subliminal shimmy or heavy warp to fundamentals and overtones that make a room tremble and sparkle—no reverb or delay required. Classic 6-string tricks—Gilmour waves, Hendrix vibe, Marr and Pretenders sway, and Graham Coxon vibrato quease—are always just a few very smooth twists away. It’s nicely built, too, with solid switchwork, silky, stable pots, and an IC that’s well-insulated from tour abuse, heavy-footed switching, and jack snapping. A tag of $219? Sure, that’s a little steep. But I bet you’ll never need another analog chorus. Why can’t everything be this delicious and simple
Mythos Pedals The Fates Chorus Demo | First Look
A powerful new reverb covers almost every imaginable incarnation of the effect.
Incredible reverb tones. Limitless tweakability. Smart interface helps conquer complexity.
Expensive.
$599
Meris MercuryX
meris.us
The Meris MercuryX is the first pedal I’ve ever played that has its own glossary, found near the back of its 32-page user manual. Advertised as “a Modular Reverb System with pro audio and studio rack heritage,” the USA-made MercuryX builds on the foundation of Meris’ Mercury7 reverb unit, which was inspired, in part, by the Lexicon 224 Greek musician Vangelis used to score for Blade Runner. The Mercury7 is a richly featured and widely celebrated effect. But by comparison, the MercuryX makes it look like an abacus.
The MercuryX’s price bracket is about as high as it gets for a non-vintage effects pedal, but spend an hour with it, and you’ll realize the staggering amount of work the Meris team must have poured into it. It’s a feat of audio engineering and imagination that can take you anywhere you want to go.
Guide to the Galaxy
Though it features an almost comical amount of adjustability, the MercuryX is hardly a bother to operate in Meris’ default graphic view on the digital display. (The text view, comparatively, felt labyrinthine, if not flat-out impossible to navigate.) Three of the pedal’s seven knobs help you navigate the edit pages, where you can adjust a suite of parameters that, like the haunting reverb algorithms, feel like they never end. The 99 preset slots are divided into banks of three, which are selected and cycled via different combinations of the four footswitches. A favorites bank lets you keep your top three presets in immediate grasp. Plus, simultaneously pressing the two switches on the right will call up a tuner on the display. The MercuryX is powered by an ARM processor which helps enable its breadth of modulation options, including tremolo, chorus, vibrato, pitch shift, tape emulation, and more. Then there’s discrete filtering, compression, and preamp gain. Each of these functions is, of course, deeply tweakable, down to independent high- and low-frequency controls. The glossy deep-blue box is equipped with mono and stereo outs, expression pedal in, MIDI jacks, and USB-C for firmware updates. It’s sleek, but more importantly, it feels like resilient armor for the complex guts contained within.
Reverb of the Nerds
It’s clear that the builders at Meris are ginormous reverb nerds. The MercuryX contains eight distinct reverb algorithms. A few are ported from the Mercury7, while others are brand new. There’s every sort of reverb sound imaginable, and they’re all magnificent. You can dial in a tight, humble spring reverb, then jump to a pitch-shifting, interdimensional wormhole or a steely, dystopian fog.
And though they invite customization, the 87 Meris-made presets are each instantly cinematic and usable. The depth of these reverbs can be difficult to convey: Somehow, every single one is imaginative and stirring, suggesting different tones, voicings, picking styles, and progressions. (I could only imagine how they’d sound with a synth, bass, or vocal.) Plus, every setting in the presets can be individually tinkered with and saved, so there’s really a mind-numbing amount of flexibility here.
But that flexibility triggers some option paralysis, too. I found myself sticking to the MercuryX’s pre-programmed settings rather than trying to build my own for two reasons. There were simply too many variables to modify, and the reverb aficionados at Meris know what they’re doing. Why overcomplicate things?
The MercuryX’s only flaw might be that it occupies an awkward in-between spot in the market. Its capabilities (and price tag) eclipse many of the higher-end reverb units available, and in practice, it often feels closer to a compact floor modeler than an effect pedal. But it is just an effect pedal. Though, maybe this is a sign of things to come: The MercuryX really does lend the feeling that, at least as far as reverb is concerned, it can do everything.
The Verdict
For the right user, the MercuryX’s complexity will be a major asset. Learn how to manipulate all the processing power included here and this pedal might be a game-changer.
The heavy pedal that became famous at the feet of Jonny Greenwood delivers surprises with colors that range from explosive to doomy, and yes—shreddy.
Top U.K.-build quality. Surprising range of unique distortion colors. Interesting interactions between EQ controls.
Could be too dark for shredders who rely on sizzling top end.
$249
Marshall ShredMaster
marshall.com
It’s a great irony that the player most popularly associated with the Marshall ShredMaster is probably Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood. Clearly, Greenwood is a guitar magician. But he is hardly a shredder in the conventional sense. So, what is it about the Marshall ShredMaster that it was given such a … um … shreddy name and yet finds favor among so many not-shreddy players? As is turns out, the explanations are many. And there are plenty of reasons shredders would find much to love in this sturdy, U.K.-made pedal too.
Blast and Squish
The ShredMaster was short-lived in its original incarnation. Introduced around 1991, it was discontinued just a year later. The timing of its release explains how it would have fallen into Greenwood’s hands and shown up on the band’s 1993 debut Pablo Honey. (I’m going to bet that the ShredMaster is doing a fair bit of the heavy lifting in “Creep’s” super-crunchy choruses.) The ShredMaster shows up all over Radiohead’s other ’90s LPs too—usually paired with Greenwood’s solid-state Fender Eighty Five. This pedal/amp pairing gives us some clues as to why the relationship endured.
See, the ShredMaster has a wonderful capacity for dark, compressed tones—the kind that would probably blend well with Greenwood’s humbucker-equipped Telecaster Plus and a bright, powerful solid-state amp. But those dark and compressed tones can also work well for super-fast picking when you’ve got high-octane pickups and a high-gain amp in your chain, working as a kind of glue as you move through fast lines and legato phrases. That’s one explanation for how this pedal bridges the chasm between metal and big indie. But while the ShredMaster doesn’t have as wide a vocabulary as Marshall pedal stablemates like the Guv’Nor, it’s an impressive source of heaviness that can work across many styles.
Because the ShredMaster can seem dark at EQ levels that, on other pedals, would translate to fairly even response, it’s important to get a feel for how the bass, contour, and treble controls work together. Of these, the contour is probably most critical. At settings in the clockwise half of its sweep, it adds a bossy midrange—PAF humbuckers gain a trashy metal edge but single-coils can sound a touch cloudy and fizzy. Left-of-center settings scoop the mids, sound more amp-like, and let more detail shine through. For most of my experiments I preferred to live in this zone.
In general, toppier treble settings also sound best. They enable single-coils to growl and will enhance sustain in humbuckers—giving bridge pickups a feral edge or, in the case of neck PAFs, a smoky heaviness that works well even with considerable volume and tone attenuation. (In general, the ShredMaster isn’t super responsive to changes in guitar input.) One should not be afraid to use a lot less bass from the ShredMaster either. While it can add welcome heft to a scooped, treble-heavy setting, it’s often a source of fogginess that puts a damper on the pedal’s most exciting and dynamite sounds. A good practice is to park the bass at noon, dial up treble and contour to levels that make your guitar sing best, and then add or subtract bass to taste.
The Verdict
Marshall wasn’t misleading us when they gave the ShredMaster its name. Its compressed, high-gain capabilities make the pedal a great partner for fast fretwork. But what any open-minded player will discover is that the ShredMaster, in spite of its name, can play many roles. It can lend heaps of mass and enhance sustain, as well as add a singing or stinging side to leads, or menace to a tame signal that needs to cut and slice on demand. And while its $249 price tag exceeds that of many pedals that drive an amp to nastiness, the ShredMaster’s unique voice and high-quality, U.K. build suggest it’s a pedal that could serve at the front line of any studio pedal collection or as a fixture on a board—offering both gigantic distortion tones and many exciting surprises over the course of a long and useful life
Marshall BluesBreaker, DriveMaster, The Guv'nor & ShredMaster Demos | First Look
Flexible and rich with liquid-to-choppy textures, this analog tremolo is addictive fun and a potent tone-shaper.
Abundant textures of analog trem’ you can really get lost in. Intuitive. Rich modulations.
Costs just enough to sting.
$279
JAM Pedals Harmonious Monk mk.2
jampedals.com
The second iteration of JAM’s Harmonious Monk, a tremolo pedal designed with Dan and Mick from That Pedal Show, has a way of making hours disappear. It’s super fun, full of sounds you can swim or drown in, and, after a short time, quite intuitive to use. I’d be surprised to encounter a gigging musician that couldn’t cover 90 percent of their tremolo needs with the mk.2. For most, I suspect, the mk.2 will cover every need and then some.
My own tremolo predilections span on-off, stop-motion, Spacemen 3 throbs and liquid, subdued, wallflower modulations. The mk.2 covers both of those extremes. Its capacity for fine tuning via the pedal’s depth, speed, level, and mix knobs; square, sine, and reverse wave shapes; and amplitude- and harmonic-style trem’—plus a tap tempo switch—lend the mk. 2 a painterly, intuitive functionality. Exploration of the expansive range of modulation sounds here can be a pretty meditative exercise. But you can just as easily use it surgically, without disappearing down a rabbit hole.
There are cool new features on the mk.2. “Tap” and “ramp,” in one button, is probably the coolest of them. It enables you to set and switch between extreme speeds as well as set the rate of the ramp. It’s a crazy-cool way to build dramatic mood shifts and even whole riffs. Even the grumpiest stompbox skeptic would have fun with the mk.2. The fact that it’s so completely practical, too, is pure cream on top.