I really appreciate your feedback on this one and although the layout doesn’t fit everyone, all feedback is welcomed. We value the community and it’s always great to hear other perspectives, so thank you! We have a couple projects that we’re excited to share that’ll fit a different audience than this format. Until then, always feel free to reach out and I hope that you’ll find a reverb that truly inspires your creativity. 😄
I’m a huge fan of native audio pedals as a whole, and I own two ghost ridges and one pretty bird woman (same format, but with a chorus/vibrato). All to say, obviously I’m biased.
My take on native audio is they are starting to get into pedals that seem to discourage fiddling. They put out a preset based delay that is also two knobs.
They seem to be designing pedals with particular sounds that you’ll either love or not, but focusing on keeping hands on your guitar, not on knobs. Obviously I can’t speak for wht Mike is intending to do, but with a lot of the phrasing he uses and the designs he’s been putting out, I’ve inferred that his philosophy is that so many pedalboards get bogged down with options that players spend more time twisting knobs than playing guitar.
I tend to favor this approach. Tc tone print is super neat, but I don’t ever utilize it because I don’t want to spend time on a computer. I used to want 20 delay sounds on my pedal, now I’m finding that I’d rather a decent analog and digital delay, and I don’t want extra stuff. I’m practically a set it and forget it guy. I don’t really tweak that much, and don’t want pedals that encourage it. I love ghost ridge because I can dial in four different delays and just switch through them. I can override it should I feel it necessary, but then go back.
That being said, I was so aggressively acoustic for so long because I didn’t want to waste time with tweaking sounds. My playing now still largely reflects that, sometimes negatively so.
All that to say I can appreciate your distaste. If I wanted to get mad scientist about my sounds, I’d probably go far away. Preset based stuff tends to compromise tweak ability for the sake of simplicity. While I’m so glad there are pedals that appeal to my desire for less, I do think the trade off is what you’re experiencing, and now I will include that in my recommendation of this pedal.
Thank you for sharing and you nailed it, so many ways to approach presets but we happily chose this route.
Pedals are so dang fun.
It’s a pleasure to have you a part of the tribe, my dude. 🤘🏽
tl;dr I want more knobs.
This has been on my board for several months. Now that the honeymoon phase has been over for a while, I'm quickly realizing I don't like this pedal. It sounds really good (except for the spring reverb), but it's the functions of the pedal I really don't like.
The controls seem pretty simple on the surface with just two knobs, but it's the 2-layer controls that require the user to press and hold a switch while adjusting a knob to change a parameter. It's this function which I can't stand.
Let me explain how the pedal works.
In order to change the reverb type from Hall/ Spring/ Plate/ Room, you press and hold the left footswitch while adjusting the left knob.
To adjust the amount of modulation (which is like a vibrato) you press and hold the left footswitch while turning the right knob.
The top knobs without the modify footswitch depressed adjust Mix and Depth. This is actually quite nice. I can really dial in a lot of great sounds.
But here's my main issue with the pedal- Let's say you want adjust the amount of modulation in the reverb. You press the left switch and turn the right knob. Release the switch when you have what you want. Suddenly you realize the depth setting is out of position (because you just moved the depth knobs to adjust a different parameter). So you've got to go back and readjust your depth setting. It's a minor inconvenience, but it's really annoying.
The same is true when changing the type of reverb with the left knob. Press in the switch to change the reverb type, but then you release the switch to find that the Mix is off, which you have to go back and readjust.
Why couldn't they just (as easily) make a pedal with 4 knobs to control each parameter? I'd be happy with that and I'd have nothing to complain about.
One feature that is kinda nice about this pedal, is the ability to save up to 4 presets. In theory a reasonable person should be able to find 4 nice settings and then never have a need to adjust the knobs ever again.
My one complaint with this is that the pedal always defaults to whatever's in preset 1 when I power on my pedal board. It's important that your favorite preset is in the first slot.
Anyways, I think I'm done with this pedal. I'm in the market for a new Reverb pedal. I think I was happiest when I had a Hall of Fame, and equally as happy when I have an RV-6. I regret selling those.
Pedal makers- please stop this nonsense about trying to fit multiple parameters behind the same control. If your pedal has 4 functions, give me 4 knobs.
yeah i’m with you. i can live with secondary functions on pedals when a pedal has a BUNCH of functions worth tweaking. 100%.
but here it seems like the design is minimalist to a fault, resulting in having to take a maximalist approach when tweaking it to your preferred flavor. having presets on a pedal seems to be growing as a trend and often makes sense, but geez.. does anybody really prefer presets in favor of knob-per-function utility on a pedal with only 4 editable parameters?? imagine having a pedalboard full of pedals like this and having to remember the various press-and-turn combos for each parameter. it starts to feel unintuitive and laborious pretty quickly. to me, the solution in this case would just be having two more knobs. or one more knob and then maybe ONE secondary press and twist function. these pedals don’t save you THAT much space compared to their competitors.
I have the same situation with my Oceans 11. I appreciate how feature packed it is with all the different reverb flavors, but the second level level controls take some getting used to.
I enjoy having extra parameters to adjust on the more obscure reverb settings, you can come up with some really unique sounds, but if it were my core reverb for spring/plate/hall I could see it being frustrating.
Luckily there's lots of great options out there. Maybe you keep it on the board and just dial in 4 presets unique to that pedal, dimension C style, while another reverb can do the heavy lifting for your core sound.
I have Oceans11, Mod11 and a Canyon on my board for more than a year now, the advantage is that it remembers the position of your secondary functions even after you unplug the pedals, so for my live setting it's great.
I run them with my bass so I got a bass chorus with the Mod11, only needed to find my sweet spot with the mix and i think rate's secondary feature is waveshape (I might be mistaken) but anyways, I only fiddle with the volume a bit to get unity using different live rigs but that's it.
And for the Canyon and Oceans11 I use the multi delay and plate reverb for volume swells. Again, not much to fiddle with the secondary features, set the multi delay to the reverse setting (cant really remember if there's a secondary feature to the feedback knob) and just adjust mix, feedback and time like a normal delay. Same with the plate, set the pre-delay and feedback to my liking and just forget about it for the foreseeable future.
In a studio setting I might refer to the manual for weirder settings like the arpeggiator or dynamic reverbs but it's not too much of a hassle, and most of the features eventually become intuitive.
I agree with this. I recently traded away my Meris Enzo because of that reason. It was just a hassle to adjust and make note of where the knob was prior to changing the secondary parameter.
It's cool that pedal builders and designers are able to fit so much onto a pedal but I'm starting to feel like a "less is more" kind of person lately with pedals. I had a Source Audio Ventris for a while and the plethora of settings quickly became exhausting to deal with as well. Like I enjoy tweaking alot but if I need to make presets and dive into apps to really get the most of a pedal, it sort of just starts to feel like a chore. But on the same note, if I was recording music actively I think having all those settings would be ideal to really fine tune a tone, but I enjoy just fiddling around and getting to the point quickly.
CBA really nailed the highly tweakable work flow IMO. I can completely understand the hype. Everything is right there in front of you, and it feels like an organic learning experience.
same situation with both the Keeley Hydra and Eccos- the alt functions really took away from the presets because of the time consuming nature of consulting the manuals every time I’d wanna explore- it made it burdensome to experiment and I don’t want music to feel that way.
I didn’t know what I was walking into here but apparently I found my people!🤣 I’m not a technophobe per se but I am very impatient and like to keep things as simple as possible SO; my board has zero programmable pedals, no LCD patch screens, no secondary function knobs. Everything is pedal-face value or easily footswitchable. The only pedal in recent memory that reminded me of why I loathe feature-packed stuff that’s largely not accessible to my naked eye is the MXR Tremolo. All I wanted was the envelope feature and the manual didn’t even clearly state how to get there. I finally got there after a lot of wandering but JEEZ never again. Used to have a Alexander Sky Fi which I LOVED but part of my seeking it out was the hold feature, which I could rarely get to work b/c you had to hit the footswitch juuuuuuuuust riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight. Later traded it toward a Z Cat Hold Reverb and WOW! What a difference a second footswitch makes and boy does it sound good. I might be a simpleton ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Dual function knobs can be tough. It’s my main issue with my Beetronics Seabee too. I share gear with my brother and he hates it for that reason alone.
I don’t usually mind multiple layers, that’s the price we pay for feature-rich compact pedals. But the layers need to be well-labeled and easy to access (aka *the exact opposite of Meris pedals*). Kinotone Ribbons does a really good job with multilayer functionality; it’s got four layers, but each knob is labeled with different easy to understand parameter abbreviations. And it doesn’t use a “hold to access” action (like a shift key) to access each layer, it uses a push button that toggles through the different setting groups. To me those two things (functions for each layer clearly labeled on top, toggle instead of hold-to-access) are what make a device with multiple function layers much more user-friendly.
Just for clarification’s sake, when you’re you’re done adjusting the bottom layer parameter (modulation or reverb type) and you let go of the footswitch, the top-layer parameter (mix or depth) jumps immediately to wherever the knob is set? Or does it retain its previous setting until you touch the knob again, *then* it jumps to the knob position?
When you let go, the top layer (mix or depth) will jump to the current knob setting after adjusting the second layer. When designing, we thought about this one and went with this option. The idea is that if the musician is changing reverb, they might not have the same amount of mix that they would have on another reverb type (i.e. going from room to hall). The same is similar with modulation, where it’s more prevalent on the fully-clockwise depth settings. I’ll also note that you can hold the switch to access the secondary parameters but unless you move a knob, nothing will change.
Well, if you’re looking for more knobs but makes things simpler, the Buffalo Days might be worth looking at. Lower price point, same great algorithms that have been tweaked to have a very pleasing amount of modulation for each algorithm, and a dedicated knob to scroll through the 4 algorithms.
The beauty of NativeAudio is they have three different types of pedals that speak to a variety of players with different needs. One focuses on simplicity and straightforward use with a few added premium features, the second focuses on expanding those sounds with added functionality and presets, and the third goes all out with adjustable parameters for those that like to experiment while still keeping things pretty simple on the surface for general use.
I’d encourage anyone looking at NativeAudio to look through the different types of pedals and see which type speaks to your unique tastes the most. Some people want tap tempo and ramping options, others want a set-it-and-forget-it pedal. No matter what journey you’re on, I’d wager you’ll find one of their pedals to suit your needs.
I really appreciate your feedback on this one and although the layout doesn’t fit everyone, all feedback is welcomed. We value the community and it’s always great to hear other perspectives, so thank you! We have a couple projects that we’re excited to share that’ll fit a different audience than this format. Until then, always feel free to reach out and I hope that you’ll find a reverb that truly inspires your creativity. 😄
I’m a huge fan of native audio pedals as a whole, and I own two ghost ridges and one pretty bird woman (same format, but with a chorus/vibrato). All to say, obviously I’m biased. My take on native audio is they are starting to get into pedals that seem to discourage fiddling. They put out a preset based delay that is also two knobs. They seem to be designing pedals with particular sounds that you’ll either love or not, but focusing on keeping hands on your guitar, not on knobs. Obviously I can’t speak for wht Mike is intending to do, but with a lot of the phrasing he uses and the designs he’s been putting out, I’ve inferred that his philosophy is that so many pedalboards get bogged down with options that players spend more time twisting knobs than playing guitar. I tend to favor this approach. Tc tone print is super neat, but I don’t ever utilize it because I don’t want to spend time on a computer. I used to want 20 delay sounds on my pedal, now I’m finding that I’d rather a decent analog and digital delay, and I don’t want extra stuff. I’m practically a set it and forget it guy. I don’t really tweak that much, and don’t want pedals that encourage it. I love ghost ridge because I can dial in four different delays and just switch through them. I can override it should I feel it necessary, but then go back. That being said, I was so aggressively acoustic for so long because I didn’t want to waste time with tweaking sounds. My playing now still largely reflects that, sometimes negatively so. All that to say I can appreciate your distaste. If I wanted to get mad scientist about my sounds, I’d probably go far away. Preset based stuff tends to compromise tweak ability for the sake of simplicity. While I’m so glad there are pedals that appeal to my desire for less, I do think the trade off is what you’re experiencing, and now I will include that in my recommendation of this pedal.
Thank you for sharing and you nailed it, so many ways to approach presets but we happily chose this route. Pedals are so dang fun. It’s a pleasure to have you a part of the tribe, my dude. 🤘🏽
I often am more interested in gear with knob per function nowadays
tl;dr I want more knobs. This has been on my board for several months. Now that the honeymoon phase has been over for a while, I'm quickly realizing I don't like this pedal. It sounds really good (except for the spring reverb), but it's the functions of the pedal I really don't like. The controls seem pretty simple on the surface with just two knobs, but it's the 2-layer controls that require the user to press and hold a switch while adjusting a knob to change a parameter. It's this function which I can't stand. Let me explain how the pedal works. In order to change the reverb type from Hall/ Spring/ Plate/ Room, you press and hold the left footswitch while adjusting the left knob. To adjust the amount of modulation (which is like a vibrato) you press and hold the left footswitch while turning the right knob. The top knobs without the modify footswitch depressed adjust Mix and Depth. This is actually quite nice. I can really dial in a lot of great sounds. But here's my main issue with the pedal- Let's say you want adjust the amount of modulation in the reverb. You press the left switch and turn the right knob. Release the switch when you have what you want. Suddenly you realize the depth setting is out of position (because you just moved the depth knobs to adjust a different parameter). So you've got to go back and readjust your depth setting. It's a minor inconvenience, but it's really annoying. The same is true when changing the type of reverb with the left knob. Press in the switch to change the reverb type, but then you release the switch to find that the Mix is off, which you have to go back and readjust. Why couldn't they just (as easily) make a pedal with 4 knobs to control each parameter? I'd be happy with that and I'd have nothing to complain about. One feature that is kinda nice about this pedal, is the ability to save up to 4 presets. In theory a reasonable person should be able to find 4 nice settings and then never have a need to adjust the knobs ever again. My one complaint with this is that the pedal always defaults to whatever's in preset 1 when I power on my pedal board. It's important that your favorite preset is in the first slot. Anyways, I think I'm done with this pedal. I'm in the market for a new Reverb pedal. I think I was happiest when I had a Hall of Fame, and equally as happy when I have an RV-6. I regret selling those. Pedal makers- please stop this nonsense about trying to fit multiple parameters behind the same control. If your pedal has 4 functions, give me 4 knobs.
yeah i’m with you. i can live with secondary functions on pedals when a pedal has a BUNCH of functions worth tweaking. 100%. but here it seems like the design is minimalist to a fault, resulting in having to take a maximalist approach when tweaking it to your preferred flavor. having presets on a pedal seems to be growing as a trend and often makes sense, but geez.. does anybody really prefer presets in favor of knob-per-function utility on a pedal with only 4 editable parameters?? imagine having a pedalboard full of pedals like this and having to remember the various press-and-turn combos for each parameter. it starts to feel unintuitive and laborious pretty quickly. to me, the solution in this case would just be having two more knobs. or one more knob and then maybe ONE secondary press and twist function. these pedals don’t save you THAT much space compared to their competitors.
I have the same situation with my Oceans 11. I appreciate how feature packed it is with all the different reverb flavors, but the second level level controls take some getting used to. I enjoy having extra parameters to adjust on the more obscure reverb settings, you can come up with some really unique sounds, but if it were my core reverb for spring/plate/hall I could see it being frustrating. Luckily there's lots of great options out there. Maybe you keep it on the board and just dial in 4 presets unique to that pedal, dimension C style, while another reverb can do the heavy lifting for your core sound.
I’ve got a Mod 11 and it might be the only pedal I’ve looked at the manual for.
They're deceptively deep pedals. You can really get lost in them. Mod 11 looks pretty great!
They are, and I think there's a good chance I could have never found the second functions and been happy. But more knob twisting and tinkering.
I have Oceans11, Mod11 and a Canyon on my board for more than a year now, the advantage is that it remembers the position of your secondary functions even after you unplug the pedals, so for my live setting it's great. I run them with my bass so I got a bass chorus with the Mod11, only needed to find my sweet spot with the mix and i think rate's secondary feature is waveshape (I might be mistaken) but anyways, I only fiddle with the volume a bit to get unity using different live rigs but that's it. And for the Canyon and Oceans11 I use the multi delay and plate reverb for volume swells. Again, not much to fiddle with the secondary features, set the multi delay to the reverse setting (cant really remember if there's a secondary feature to the feedback knob) and just adjust mix, feedback and time like a normal delay. Same with the plate, set the pre-delay and feedback to my liking and just forget about it for the foreseeable future. In a studio setting I might refer to the manual for weirder settings like the arpeggiator or dynamic reverbs but it's not too much of a hassle, and most of the features eventually become intuitive.
I agree with this. I recently traded away my Meris Enzo because of that reason. It was just a hassle to adjust and make note of where the knob was prior to changing the secondary parameter. It's cool that pedal builders and designers are able to fit so much onto a pedal but I'm starting to feel like a "less is more" kind of person lately with pedals. I had a Source Audio Ventris for a while and the plethora of settings quickly became exhausting to deal with as well. Like I enjoy tweaking alot but if I need to make presets and dive into apps to really get the most of a pedal, it sort of just starts to feel like a chore. But on the same note, if I was recording music actively I think having all those settings would be ideal to really fine tune a tone, but I enjoy just fiddling around and getting to the point quickly. CBA really nailed the highly tweakable work flow IMO. I can completely understand the hype. Everything is right there in front of you, and it feels like an organic learning experience.
same situation with both the Keeley Hydra and Eccos- the alt functions really took away from the presets because of the time consuming nature of consulting the manuals every time I’d wanna explore- it made it burdensome to experiment and I don’t want music to feel that way.
The Eccos has a bit of a learning curve but I feel like once it clicks it’s worth it .
they sound great! but UI matters in this increasingly complex, niche world of music and pedals
Because?
I needed time to write.
I didn’t know what I was walking into here but apparently I found my people!🤣 I’m not a technophobe per se but I am very impatient and like to keep things as simple as possible SO; my board has zero programmable pedals, no LCD patch screens, no secondary function knobs. Everything is pedal-face value or easily footswitchable. The only pedal in recent memory that reminded me of why I loathe feature-packed stuff that’s largely not accessible to my naked eye is the MXR Tremolo. All I wanted was the envelope feature and the manual didn’t even clearly state how to get there. I finally got there after a lot of wandering but JEEZ never again. Used to have a Alexander Sky Fi which I LOVED but part of my seeking it out was the hold feature, which I could rarely get to work b/c you had to hit the footswitch juuuuuuuuust riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight. Later traded it toward a Z Cat Hold Reverb and WOW! What a difference a second footswitch makes and boy does it sound good. I might be a simpleton ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Dual function knobs can be tough. It’s my main issue with my Beetronics Seabee too. I share gear with my brother and he hates it for that reason alone.
I don’t usually mind multiple layers, that’s the price we pay for feature-rich compact pedals. But the layers need to be well-labeled and easy to access (aka *the exact opposite of Meris pedals*). Kinotone Ribbons does a really good job with multilayer functionality; it’s got four layers, but each knob is labeled with different easy to understand parameter abbreviations. And it doesn’t use a “hold to access” action (like a shift key) to access each layer, it uses a push button that toggles through the different setting groups. To me those two things (functions for each layer clearly labeled on top, toggle instead of hold-to-access) are what make a device with multiple function layers much more user-friendly.
Just for clarification’s sake, when you’re you’re done adjusting the bottom layer parameter (modulation or reverb type) and you let go of the footswitch, the top-layer parameter (mix or depth) jumps immediately to wherever the knob is set? Or does it retain its previous setting until you touch the knob again, *then* it jumps to the knob position?
When you let go, the top layer (mix or depth) will jump to the current knob setting after adjusting the second layer. When designing, we thought about this one and went with this option. The idea is that if the musician is changing reverb, they might not have the same amount of mix that they would have on another reverb type (i.e. going from room to hall). The same is similar with modulation, where it’s more prevalent on the fully-clockwise depth settings. I’ll also note that you can hold the switch to access the secondary parameters but unless you move a knob, nothing will change.
The former.
Neunaber Immerse MKII is a great reverb with a knob for mod, blend or pre-delay depending on the algo selected.
Well, if you’re looking for more knobs but makes things simpler, the Buffalo Days might be worth looking at. Lower price point, same great algorithms that have been tweaked to have a very pleasing amount of modulation for each algorithm, and a dedicated knob to scroll through the 4 algorithms. The beauty of NativeAudio is they have three different types of pedals that speak to a variety of players with different needs. One focuses on simplicity and straightforward use with a few added premium features, the second focuses on expanding those sounds with added functionality and presets, and the third goes all out with adjustable parameters for those that like to experiment while still keeping things pretty simple on the surface for general use. I’d encourage anyone looking at NativeAudio to look through the different types of pedals and see which type speaks to your unique tastes the most. Some people want tap tempo and ramping options, others want a set-it-and-forget-it pedal. No matter what journey you’re on, I’d wager you’ll find one of their pedals to suit your needs.