I played last night with a buddies reverb pedal he uses on guitar and loved it. Do they make them specific to a harp or will a guitar pedal work well? Also looking for one to add a lot of distortion. Thoughts?
Guitar pedal will work. I just got a Danelectro Corned Beef not long ago. I've had very good results with it. The only harp-specific reverb pedal I know of is the Lone Wolf Harp Reverb. I've yet to try one. There are a lot of different guitar reverb pedals that have good results for harp though. VanAmps Solemate....EH Holy Grail...Boss FRV-1...etc...
I really wish the Peavey Valverb unit was still being made. Tube driven verb and tremolo with footswitches. Awesome!
Look at Lone Wolf pedals, designed for harp. They make a reverb pedal that just came out. I remember a post not too long back talking about it. http://www.lonewolfblues.com/reverb.html
For distortion (depending on what you mean by that) look into the Harp Break or Harp Octave. The Octave isn't an octave pedal, it just provides overtones that give a specific distortion tone. There are Youtube vids out there to give you sound ideas.
Can you give more specifics about the pedal you tried as well as the other gear involved? Do you have a reference track or two of the sorta sound you are after? What mic are you using?
One blanket statement to consider is that increased gain will lead to potentially more feedback, as will adding reverb. A clean sound with a touch of verb is much easier to control than heavy distortion with reverb.
Tho I will say I am somewhat biased here, as I helped in the development of the design of the Lone Wolf Har Reverb pedal, that pedal has the dry signal totally left alone and the reverb tone and amount affects the reverb signal, which avoids much of the feedback problems associated with reverb, regardless of clean or dirty signal, as many times pedals, and even more so, amps with reverb built into the amp affect both signals and the first reverb pedal ever designed where you could have the controls affect only the reverb signal and leave the dry signal alone was the long discontinued Guyatone MR-2, and later used by them on their outboard tube reverb unit and so the Lone Wolf reverb pedal works along this same way.
Most pedals will affect both signals. ---------- Sincerely, Barbeque Bob Maglinte Boston, MA http://www.barbequebob.com CD available at http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/bbmaglinte
One thing I like about the Boss FDR1 pedal is that it warms up the tone a bit and offers a lot of flexibility. Level and Gain, Bass, Treble, Vibrato and Reverb. And you can use the foot switch to vary the vibrato speed.
And it is only $129 new.
It has a nice sound, but actually I prefer a delay pedal with one slap back low in the mix. Killah.....
The amp is a mission 32-20 with 2 10's.. The mic is one Greg built with a 99A86 element. It is setup for wireless but I went through the cable when using the pedal. The pedal was a "Boss DR (delay and reverb) something" as my friend so eloquently put it.
I'm not an overly skilled player compared to most of you guys. I'm a year and 3 months into cross harp so I'd get laughed right off the site. I am please with my rig and spared little expense on it to help force me to practice. So far so good.
I use slapback with my clean and dirty tones and stack longer delays as needed. I have the LW V2 delay, which is perfect for that...very transparent. I had a MXR before that and loved that too! ---------- Mantra Customized Harmonicas My Website
The Lone Wolf pedals, being designed specifically for harp, has one BIG advantage over other pedals is that they contain a circuit the PROPERLY matches the true impedance of whatever microphone you use for the instrument and all of the others are designed for guitar and won't have that circuitry in them.
Two popular delay pedals used by harp players, the Boss DD-3 and Danelectro Dan Echo often had noise problems because of impedance mismatches and for a number of years, John Kinder of Kinder Instruments (the maker of the Harp King amps) did mods so that these pedals would properly match the true impedance of whatever mic you used and that eliminated the noise problems. ---------- Sincerely, Barbeque Bob Maglinte Boston, MA http://www.barbequebob.com CD available at http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/bbmaglinte
I have the lone wolf reverb pedal and I cand get a really good reverb effect on it. Sad hours and blue midnight sound great. You can go real vintage with a darker reverb effect to a more modern effect. I haven't gone wrong with the lone wolf pedals. I liked the fact that bbqbob was involved as his advice has been spot on over the years.
@monk, I have the mission 32-20 2 x10 and the lw reverb pedal goes real well with at set-up. I listened to your song. Very nice! Who is singing, he's got a great voice!
Last Edited by blueswannabe on Sep 27, 2013 7:17 PM
I prefer tube driven spring rerverb. The VanAmps is a good unit for a non-tube driven spring reverb. Got one for sale... For a tube driven spring unit this one is killer, DB Fillmore. Just got mine a few days ago. All tube units will add some noise though.
I myself love a real tube driven spring reverb and most of the pedals emulating them have one missing key ingredient and that's the fact that they're EXTREMELY touch sensitive, especially the vintage stuff like the Pre-CBS Fender outboard tube reverb, the Premier 90 (my hands down favorite), the ones built into the pre-CBS Fender Twin Reverbs, Super Reverbs, Vibroverbs, and the early Ampeg amps (the best of the ones in the amp IMO), and one outobard tube reverb recently discontinued, the Guyatone FR-3000V.
the reverb pedals that have several different types of reverbs, when it comes to the spring emulation, lacks the touch sensitivity of a real spring reverb, and right now, the Lone Wolf (which I was involved in its design) and the Wampler Faux Spring Reverb are the only ones I've run across where it is touch sensitive and also you can hear the classic spring "boinging" when you play guitar thru it at full tilt.
The LW design also takes from the Guyatone tube reverb as well as their long discontinued MR-@ pedal where they had a switch that reverb effects either both et and dry signal or just the dry signal, and when it was just on the dry signal, you could crank it and almost never feedback at all and on the LW pedal, it is already setup so that it just effects the wet signal and the dry signal is left out of the path and so if you still feedback, you"ve probably set the amp or mic level up too high to begin with. ---------- Sincerely, Barbeque Bob Maglinte Boston, MA http://www.barbequebob.com CD available at http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/bbmaglinte
We were messing around with my friend's multi-effect guitar pedal and we found (and then lost, someone changed the setting and we didn't write it down) a setting that made me sound just like a trumpet.
My amp has a built in reverb, so I haven't had much experience with reverb pedals. I do have a vocal pedal that I sometimes run my harp through though and once I adjust it a bit it sounds fine for harp (and my friend's multi-pedal was actually really great for harp.)
A reverb pedal "designed" for harp? Can you say "marketing" ? Sorry but I'm just not buying it. A reverb pedal is a reverb pedal. Same thing goes for EQ pedals, octave pedals, etc.
@Mudhound --- From personal experience using guitar pedals, the biggest difference with a pedal specifically designed for harmonica one designed for a guitar is that with a guitar pedal, the effect and dry signals are together, which for a reverb pedal, can quickly cause major feedback problems when the reverb setting is too high, but even more importantly, as with the LW pedals, those pedals automatically match the TRUE impedance of whatever mic you use, be it anything from a SM57/58/545 to a GB to a crystal/ceramic mic, and the impedances of these mics are often far different even tho they're considered high impedance (meaning that anything over 600 ohms is considered high-z, but there's a HUGE variable there with crystals/ceramics are ultra hi-z).
Like I mentioned earlier in my previous post, two delay pedals popular with harp players, the Dan Echo and Boss DD-3 often had noise problems with most harp mics because of an impedance mismatch and once someone who had a clue adjusted the actual impedance on those pedals, the noise problems immediately went away. ---------- Sincerely, Barbeque Bob Maglinte Boston, MA http://www.barbequebob.com CD available at http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/bbmaglinte
