JHS 3 Series PHERB

The JHS 3 Series PHERB is a phaser and a reverb in one pedal, and both are on all the time. JHS describes it as "a dark, moody lo-fi reverb running into a four-stage phase shifter," with the wet signal recombined with your dry guitar at the output¹. The name is simply Phaser plus Reverb, and the pedal was built from the ground up, in house, in October 2026¹.

What that means in practice: your guitar feeds a reverb whose decay can stretch from 241 ms to nearly 50 seconds, and that reverberated signal then passes through a four-stage phase shifter, so the sweep moves through the ambience rather than just the dry note. The result is a modulated wash rather than a conventional phaser effect¹.

The controls

The PHERB follows the 3 Series formula of three knobs and one toggle²:

The LENGTH knob is the interesting one for a player used to separate reverb and phaser pedals. Because the phaser sits after the reverb, a longer decay gives the sweep more material to work on, so the two controls interact rather than working independently¹.

The phaser rate spans 0.05 Hz to 5 Hz¹. At the slow end that is one sweep every 20 seconds, a drift you will hear more than see; at the fast end it is a quick, choppy swirl. The reverb decay, measured as RT60, runs from 241 ms to 49.83 seconds¹, which covers everything from a small room to an endless wash.

What BREAK mode does

With the BREAK toggle up, your signal hits what JHS calls an "asymmetric bitcrusher" with analog-style clipping before it reaches the reverb and phaser¹. In JHS's words, "BREAK mode takes the whole signal, reverb, phaser and your dry guitar, and destroys it"¹. It is a lo-fi degradation effect, not a clean boost: the bitcrusher reduces the signal's resolution, and the clipping adds analog-style grit on the way in.

With the toggle down, the pedal runs in normal mode, and there is one useful trick hidden there: turning SPEED fully counterclockwise disables the phaser and leaves the reverb on its own¹. That is the only way to get reverb-only out of the PHERB.

Where the PHERB comes from

The PHERB is part of JHS's 3 Series, a line of $99 pedals the company launched in late 2020³. Every pedal in the line shares the same three-knob, one-toggle, one-footswitch layout², and each is made by JHS in Kansas City, Missouri².

The PHERB itself has an unusually short history. JHS says it was "decided, designed, prototyped and approved for production in just 35 hours," calling it "the fastest pedal we have ever made"¹. The whole process, from idea to production approval, happened in October 2026¹.

The phaser section has a clear lineage. JHS describes it as "a four-stage vintage style phase shifter (think Phase 90) with the feedback left off and the notch sweeps moved up through the frequency spectrum"¹. So while the architecture points at the classic MXR circuit, the voicing is shifted: no feedback means a subtler, less resonant sweep than a stock Phase 90, and the moved notches place the effect higher in the frequency range.

It is not JHS's first phaser. The 3 Series Phaser, released in late 2021, was the company's first phaser ever⁴⁵⁶, and it is a different animal: a six-stage circuit inspired by the classic phaser circuits of the 1970s⁵, with Blend, Rate and Width controls plus a Feedback toggle⁶. Delicious Audio noted at the time that its Blend control and Feedback toggle opened up "a wider range of tones" beyond the standard phase sounds⁴. The PHERB gives up all of that flexibility in exchange for a fixed, always-on character, and adds the reverb the Phaser never had.

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