Boss FRV-1 Reverb
As Close As You Can Get To
A Tank In Pedal Form
Reverb has been around as an effect for a long, long time. The
word echo springs from ancient mythology which shows that people have
been fascinated by this phenomena for a long time. Reverberation
is the collision of echoes in an enclosed space.
When reverberation was first used in recordings, something that was more likely to happen for movies than music, they used reverberation chambers. A speaker was placed in an enclosed room and a microphone picked up the echo. More than a few older recordings featured the natural reverberation of the studio's restroom.
Plate reverb used a sheet metal plate driven in a similar manor to a speaker with the vibrations of the plate captured and converted to an electrical signal. Later on spring reverb accomplished the same effect in a more compact package as a bit of signal was sent through a set of suspended springs and then those vibrations were recovered and mixed into the dry signal.
Spring reverb brought reverb out of the realm of the recording studio and into the eager hands of musicians. Spring reverbs were installed in organs, guitar amplifiers and were available as stand alone units that could be placed between an electric instrument and an amplifier.
Surf Music and Reverb
Duane Eddy is said to have used a water tank as a reverb unit on early recordings in Lee Greenwood's studio. One thing is for certain, he set a standard for the twangy sound of instrumental music in the early years of Rock 'n' Roll. There were a lot of people trying to capture his sound and reverb was very popular in the late '50s on into the '60s.
Right about the time that reverb became readily available as a portable effect Surf Music hit the airwaves. Dick Dale was one of the first, if not the first Surf guitarist. With the Beach Boys singing about surfing and Instrumental Rock bands playing hard driving melodies with a strong beat surf culture became popular even in places with no beach at all. Reverb was a big part of it.
To this day Surf guitarists tend to be reverb experts with ears that can detect subtleties of reverb that most people would never notice. Most surf players will tell you that if you want to capture the real sound of Surf reverb you need an external unit that adds reverb before the signal hits the amp.
The Reverb "Tank"
In the early '60s Fender brought out their tube reverb unit and they caught on big with the Surf players. A Fender tube reverb had a great reverb sound and like all spring reverbs if you hit it hard enough with a low note you could hear the springs slap. The tube reverb was also a pre-amp and the signal coming out of it hit the front end of a guitar amp pretty hard. The sound of a Fender Tube Reverb feeding into a clean Fender amp was hard to beat. A swift kick would get you a great sounding crash as the springs reacted.
Surf music was all but dead for years after the British Invasion but eventually people remembered it and how much they loved the fresh sounds of Surf. There was some degree of revival in the '80s but the movie Pulp Fiction brought Surf music to a whole new audience in 1994 and the genre has maintained a presence ever since. Interestingly, 1994 was also the year that Fender introduced a reissue of their tube reverb unit.
Now external spring reverb units are considered the ultimate by many reverb aficionados and I certainly would never argue against that position. If you want the original sound it's hard to improve upon the original gear. A Fender tube reverb unit is about the size of an amplifier head. It's easily carried in one hand and the cost is reasonable. Nonetheless, there are plenty of us that don't play that much Surf but would really like to be able to at least approach the surf sound.
Enter the Boss Legend Series Pedals
Boss started a line of pedals that modeled some classic Fender amps a
while back and these have gained a bit of a following. The first
two in this series were the
FBM-1 pedal which models a '59 Fender Bassman amp and the FDR-1 which models the '65 Fender Deluxe reverb.
Both of these pedals have a control layout based upon the amp they are
modeling and I can tell you from experience that they work very well.
I use an FDR-1 on my pedal board just to warm up the sound a bit and I'm
always very pleased with the touch sensitive nature of the pedal.
Recently I read that Fender was offering a pedal that modeled the '63 tube reverb unit and I pre-ordered one immediately. After counting the days until its release I was not disappointed with the results.
Without Further Ado, The FRV-1 Pedal
In keeping with the rest of the legend series the FRV-1 has the same control layout as the device it's designed to model. There are three knobs, Mixer, Tone and Dwell. The mixer controls the mix of dry signal to wet signal, the tone works like any other tone control and the dwell basically controls how hard the signal hits the springs, except there are no real springs in the FRV-1, just a digital recreation of how a tube reverb affects a signal. In any event, the controls work intuitively and the pedal is easy to adjust. Just as with the real thing the starting point is to set all of the knobs to 6 and tweak from that starting point.
I don't have a Fender tube reverb for a back to back test but I do have two Fender amps with great built-in reverb. The quality of sound from this pedal is certainly on par with the sound of the built in reverb in either of my amps with one important difference; it can be driven much harder before becoming too saturated. All reverb will go over the top at some point and become less than pleasant to listen to but the FRV-1 reaches the point quite late in the game as compared to a built in spring reverb.
One thing that Surf guitarists cherish is the "drip" they can get from their reverb tanks. If you drive the reverb hard, especially if you also palm-mute the strings at the bridge you can get a great drip sound that is featured on quite a few classic Surf recordings. The FRV-1 doesn't seem to do this quite as well as a real Fender tube reverb but it does it much more convincingly than any other external reverb pedal I've ever played and, at least in my opinion, it's every bit as good at the drip sound as the built in spring reverb in my Fender amps.
Applications
Whenever I look at an effects pedal I think first in terms of real estate. Pedal boards can only take up so much room on a crowded stage and any pedal that I place on that board has to earn its keep. The FRV-1 earned its space by virtue of several facts. In the first place, it just plain sounds great. Surf or no Surf, it's a great reverb sound available at the tap of a toe. Like the other legend series pedals it seems to be quite touch sensitive and realistic in its response. It allows me to have two levels of reverb available at will, the lower setting that I use as a default can be setup on my amplifier's onboard reverb (which is also footswitch controlled) and the FRV-1 can be used when I want a lot of reverb whether for Surf music or some of the more reverb laden Country tunes I'm called upon to play from time to time.
Another application of this sort of pedal comes to me from a friend that plays lead guitar in a fine Surf band named Meshugga Beach Party. Recently they had to play while riding on a float. Every bump and imperfection of the road caused his reverb tank to crash. Fortunately he had a Boss RE-20 tape echo pedal and these can be set to reverb only. While the quality of this reverb doesn't rival his tank it at least got him through the gig. If the FRV-1 had been along for the ride he may have been able to come closer to his normal sound. Even if it's not used often I tend to think that anyone that relies heavily upon reverb would do well to keep one of these with them at any gig.
