MXR M300 Reverb Electric Guitar Effect Pedal

Product Information

We particularly love the shimmer mode with its angelic chorus of octave-up voices adding a synth-like quality to your guitar tone. The modulated mode is fantastic as well, adding a dark, warm wash with a lovely movement to it to your sound. You get a dynamic mode that responds to your playing touch, and even a nice delay plus reverb to throw in the mix.

The knobs are a familiar and conventional set: decay, tone, and mix—essentially the same controls you see on a vintage Fender Reverb. The key to the wider universe within the MXR Reverb is the tone knob, which doubles as a push-button voice selector. Pushing the button illuminates one of the three LEDs in ether green or red. The color—and LED that is illuminated—indicates which of the six voices you’ve selected. One note of warning: You’ll have to use a light touch when making tone adjustments. The push switch is sensitive and it’s very easy to accidentally switch voices. Reverb is, for the most part, a digital effect. This is because for it to be analog, you’d need something physical to play your sound through. Early reverb effects like the plate reverb required huge metal sheets through which the sound was played. Echo chambers had sounds played into them which were then captured by a microphone and added to the dry signal to create a sense of space on the recording. So as you can imagine, it’s pretty inconvenient to use an analog reverb outside of the studio or sound design spaces.The sound quality of all of the effects is stellar, boasting smooth tails and pro-studio-quality noise-free performance. The spring reverb setting is based on a 1962 Fender 6G15 reverb unit and delivers some of the best spring reverb effects you’ll ever hear. Echo combines delay and reverb, while tremolo applies a tremolo effect to both wet and dry hall reverb. The harder, more right-angled reverberations of the room reverb are less immediately satisfying, but provide a great blank slate for percussive delays and tremolos. Without other effects, short decay and mix settings in room mode tend to evoke the less-than-charming space of an empty apartment. More extreme settings, however, create very big spaces, with a minimum of additional color, for other effects to work within. Shimmer is an ethereal, octave-up reverb effect with a long, sustaining tail that produces a synth-like texture, and the polyphonic reverb applies two programmable pitch shifts to the reverb tail to also generate complex, synth-like sounds. Most guitarists who love reverb fall into either the vintage or ambient camp, and both are well catered for here. The plate, spring and room modes have a convincing depth and sense of physical space, and record very well. Darker tone settings yield impressively authentic, retro-flavoured results. Of the two modulated reverbs—mod and epic—I used the former most. The extra kinetic energy adds a dreamy, drifting layer to spacious chord progressions and lazy, moody lead passages—especially when used a little lower in the mix. The colliding modulated reverbs of the epic setting are less elegant, generating high harmonic tone shards in longer decays that betray a touch of their digital origin. I did notice, however, that this texture is more effective in a band context, where ride cymbals and bass undercurrents help soften the harmonic edges.

That said, spring reverbs had a physical spring that the sound was played through to create it’s metallic twang, and you can still get these analog-type reverbs today, usually found built into amplifiers. Gamechanger Audio and Danelectro both do physical spring reverb pedals too, bringing analog sound straight to your pedalboard. How we choose the best reverb pedals MXR make some incredible pedals but oddly enough they have never really had many reverb pedals in their lineup. The M300 has 6 different reverbs available at your feet with three simple controls to get everything set up up nice and easy. There are dedicated controls on the front panel for adding harmonic intervals, shimmer reverb tails, and modulation to the core reverb sound, plus a footswitch to trigger an infinite reverb mode. There’s a ludicrous amount of reverb pedals available, doing everything from warm room tones and period-accurate spring reverbs, right through to ambient modulated synth sounds that reverberate infinitely. Choosing the best reverb pedal for you can be tough, so it’s important to do your research before pulling the trigger, especially as the majority of the pedals are relatively expensive. A reverb pedal simulates a space for the sound of your guitar to occupy. When you clap your hands in a large room, you’ll hear the sound of your clap bouncing off the walls and surfaces of the area around you. A reverb pedal does the exact same thing for your instrument, artificially recreating the sound as it if it were happening in that space.

Unless you’ve been marooned on a island, entirely apart from guitar-nerd media, you may have noticed that we are mired in a reverb arms race. Around the globe, pedal weirdoes are tweaking algorithms and stuffing knob upon knob of fine-tuning power to create the most distantly spacy, authentically springy, and perfectly plate-y reverbs. The lower left rotary switch knob on the Oceans 11’s front panel gives the strongest indication of the complexity lurking within this diminutive device. Here, users will find 11 different settings that consist of hall, spring, plate, reverse, echo, tremolo, modulated, dynamic, auto-infinite, shimmer, and polyphonic effects. CONTROLS Decay, tone, mix. Tone control doubles as reverb style selector cycling through plate, spring, epic, mod, room and pad modes No one wants a pedal that takes ages to set up. Simplicity is key especially with things like reverb, that is why the MXR just has three simple controls. Mix which sets the dry/wet mix of the effect, Tone sets the feel of the effect rolling in more high end, the Decay control sets how long you want the reverb to last. Nice and simple to set up and get any tone you want. Here's what MXR say about the M300 Reverb Pedal

When it comes to premium digital emulations of classic studio and amp reverbs in one portable place on your 'board, this Universal Audio pedal sets the standard. Three different choices in each category of spring, plate and hall reverbs can be found here, channeling the company's plugin prowess into pedal form for the first time. Finally, there's also a step-sequencer in the NightSky, presumably to add experimental options akin to those in the Hologram Infinite Jets and Microcosm. It's not clear that it's a USP in the context of the NightSky, which is more of a studio reverb workstation than an esoteric weirdo box. The straight-forward layout of Regen, Mix, and Delay controls on the Carbon Copy provide an extremely open-ended array of delay tones to work with. Regen controls the number of repeats in the delay signal, while Delay controls the time between each repeat. The Mix knob adjusts the level of dry and delayed signal going to the output.Presets are accessible in separate banks of three presets (A, B, and C), which are accessible via the pedal’s three footswitches and/or the rotary value control knob. The large LED displays preset info, including its number and a programmable name. The LEDs surrounding the rotary reverb-type control change color from green to amber to let users know when a preset has been modified. First and foremost, we are musicians, and we want other players to find the right product for them. So we take into careful consideration everything from budget to feature set, ease of use and durability to come up with a list of what we can safely say are the best reverb pedals on the market right now.