Poly Effects announces Verbs convolution reverb pedal
December 14, 2023 · 2 sources
Poly Effects announced Verbs, an impulse response-based reverb pedal, on December 14, 20231. Sonic State reported that the unit builds on the company's earlier Beebo and Hector modular effects and synthesis units, with the entirety of its processing power dedicated to reverb1.
Verbs holds 48 presets across seven categories of eight, and eight of those slots can be filled with spaces the user captures12. The categories are Pool of the Blackstar, Capricornia Caves, Santa Lucia Basilica, Echo Plates, Analog Devices, Irregular Verbs and Adverbs1. The captures include real locations and vintage hardware: the Pantheon of Rome, a nuclear reactor hall, cooling towers, railway tunnels, EMT140 plates, springs, a Lexicon 480L and an oil can unit1. Guitar Pedal X lists specific captures including the Inchdown Oil Tanks in Invergordon, Scotland, described as the longest reverb in the world, an EMT 140 Plate from 1957 and a Fender Brown Face Reverb Tank from 19622. Adverbs holds imported reverbs and by default includes Maeshowe, a neolithic monument built around 2800 BC1. Guitar Pedal X reports that user IRs are captured by popping a balloon and imported via USB-C2.
The controls are Onset (predelay), Mix, Low Cut and Smoosh2. The A footswitch is held for a reverb crescendo; the B footswitch bypasses and, held, scrolls through presets2. Poly Effects describes Smoosh as spreading and expanding the sound particles to fill the void1. The pedal has TRS stereo in and out and MIDI Type A TRS in and out, and it runs mono to mono or stereo to stereo but not mono to stereo1. All main controls respond to MIDI CC, and the unit responds to program changes on MIDI channels 1 to 61. Guitar Pedal X lists 9VDC 500mA power and a USB-C port for flash drives and updates2. Poly Effects says the dry signal has zero latency and passes through an analog dry path, so it is never converted1. The earlier Beebo and Hector implementation had an impulse size of 5 seconds; Verbs offers more than 10 times the IR length1.
"You have 48 presets with different captures to explore. 8 of these can be filled with imported spaces you can capture yourself."
Guitar Pedal X reported that units shipped to Perfect Circuit in the USA were set to read-only mode, leaving customers unable to save presets until Poly Effects' Loki released a fix update within a week of the issue being reported2. The same review measured startup at nearly 50 seconds and noted the pedal always starts on the first preset2. No US price was given in either report.