I’ve finally picked up a Hotone Verbera (normally $299 / £249), where I paid £229 at Andertons - super good value, and I’ve been incredibly impressed right from the start. The control interface is mostly pretty intuitive - and the value of this pedal is hard to beat. It could even be my favourite Reverb workstation to-date - but it’s a little early to call - I normally give it at least a few months!

It’s been a long time coming - and has been held off for quite a few months by a combination...

In many ways this is the most straightforward category with singular award nominees - GOLD, SILVER and BRONZE.

It’s the second smallest category after Distortions - and the one where I own the least number of pedals in proportion to the whole - just 10 out of these 26.

The order pretty much set itself - with the Cornerstone Nucleo being the clear winner from the start. I’m so impressed with every aspect of that pedal - it’s a perfect Trifecta of Design, Feaures and Playability - pretty ...

I own a fairly significant number of Reverb Pedals - where I’m mostly focused on Workstation style Pedals with multiple algorithms. I normally have at least 2 Reverbs on the board - a Primary Multi-Verb, and a Secondary more Specialist Verb. Occasionally I have a 3rd Reverb - which can be another Stereo Secondary, or more likely a Mono Tertiary. In fact I can have as many as 4 Reverbs on the board - as the Eventide H90 is always there too!

You can see from my various Pedal-Chain posts that ...

So this Hotone Verbera is the diametric opposite to the Crazy Tube Circuits Mirage I featured yesterday - but still at its heart a Dual Reverb. Where the Mirage has 16 fixed algorithms per side, and this one allows you to make use of 200 Presets - with 120 smart IR’s already loaded onto the device from a number of different sources. The are a combination of IR Reverbs and Studio Engineered Presets.

This is not my first rodeo as far as Convolution Reverbs go - my first of that kind was the ...

The original BigSky was a total game-changer in 2013 and ushered in the era of pristine pro studio level reverb workstation pedals. When I got stuck into pedals properly around 10 years ago, the Strymon Stryfecta of BigSky, Mobius and Timeline was one of the first major investments I made!

Since then I’ve had a number of different Reverb Workstations (around a dozen) on that particular #41 slot (I love and retain all of those) - which slot is currently fabulously occupied by the Poly Verbs ...

Like many I was entirely captivated by the Andertons demo of this pedal (as below) - and was fortunate to be quick enough off the mark to snag one of from the very first edition. My good friend Joe Halliday of Hello Sailor Effects obviously came across the demo just a little bit after me - as I surely snagged one of the last ones from that small initial Andertons batch. The fact that there is an Icelandic Space featured (my country of birth) on the VERBS - was also instrumental in my rapid ...