Fender Music Australia | fender.com.au | RRP: $299.00
No stranger to working with sparkling tones, Fender have finally jumped wholeheartedly into the game of making pedals and are definitely making up for lost time. The Acoustic Preverb is voiced specifically for acoustic guitar and can certainly bring out the best in your tone and ambience. Characteristic of the company, Fender have produced this pedal with all the considerate fittings that will make adding it to your board or using it alone on stage a breeze.
The Acoustic Preverb has three reverb modes; Large Hall, Room and Plate, but it is more than a simple reverb pedal. Its high-fidelity preamp ensures detail and clarity, minimizing distortion. Its tilt knob is handy, allowing you to adjust the overall EQ balance. This balances lows and highs, boosting and/or cutting treble and bass. This gives the option of bright tones and also having lows sit better in the mix by the turn of a knob.
The damping feature is a favourite of mine as it allows you to tailor the reverb effects, controlling how quickly high frequencies decay, so when you crank this knob, the reverb tail becomes darker fading out. Time controls the overall reverb decay time, meaning you can really fine tune this effect for subtly diverse ambience.
The notch switch and its control knob can be activated and used to control the loudest feedback tone by sweeping slowly while you’re experiencing feedback until it stops. Honestly, this pedal is a seriously considerate one. It’s quite handy in larger stage setting to bring the overall volume up. The design and features of this pedal are not too complex, but with enough to cover everything you could need in a live situation using reverb. The gain control knob is of course a clean gain for low output instruments, making it perfectly suitable for your acoustic guitar.
The Large Hall reverb reminds me of when I’d play at the foyers of town halls for events, the liveliness and excitement, pouring in. That is how organic and natural this reverb sounds. With the gain turned up a little for character and the damping down you can get a sparkling ambience with no sacrifice to tone. The Room reverb is reminiscent of being in a recording studio, a room specifically built for optimal reverberation.
The plate reverb has always been quite a unique one as it doesn’t mimic a real-world acoustic space. Originally created by using a magnetic driver to drive vibrations into a large sheet of metal, this reverb sound became extremely popular having nestled its way into the artillery at Abbey Road Studios in the 1960s. It can be heard on the early recordings of the Beatles and Pink Floyd, now, readily available to make your acoustic sound stand out. For something that is replicating the sound of vibration through metal, it really is such a warm and inviting sound. Fender really have got these reverb modes spot on.
All of this is encased in a stylish, lightweight, and durable anodized aluminum chassis. There’s a switch at the bottom that enables you to switch the LEDs on and off which is so very considerate for live performance or even just to suit the mood of creativity in your practice room. It’s 9v DC in battery powered making sure that powering this beauty up is no trouble at all, fitting in perfectly to any standard pedal board.
As per usual, the convenience and consideration in the specifications of this pedal are truly at the forefront of the market. This is a beautiful pedal to have in your collection that pairs so well with even just a little more overdrive or simply on its own.
Check out the Fender effects pedal range in full here.
