EarthQuaker Devices presents room, hall and plate reverbs in a innovative, compact format with the Ledges Tri-Dimensional Reverberation Machine
Three is the magic number when it comes to ambience, and a presets-loaded stompbox that can add subtle space or something more transcendent to your guitar tone
EarthQuaker Devices has unveiled the Tri-Dimensional Reverberation Machine, a new reverb pedal that packs the three main flavours of ambience – room, hall and plate – and offers the option to save your favourite sounds down as presets.
There looks to be lots to recommend this guitar effects pedal, not least its size, and the top-mounted jacks that will save space on crowded pedalboards. But the capacity to add subtle ambience to your electric guitar tone, a little space to give it life, alongside more outré sounds for the soundscape specialists out there, and then to save these tones as presets is the big selling point.
The three modes are selected by a toggle switch. There are dials for Length, Damping for taking the high-end sheen off the reverb tails, Mix to adjust the level of reverb, and a six-way rotary dial is on-hand for saving and recalling presets. Pretty simple.
Room reverb takes its name from the space it is mimicking; it is the smallest reverb on the menu, and you can set it to be very subtle and “boxy” to large room settings. Hall has a bit more play on the Length dial, and if you really dime it you will get that cathedral-esque bloom to your reverb – “big, boomy and echoey with distant reflections,” says EQD.
Plate mode, meanwhile, can give you some really interesting effects as you turn the Length dial clockwise. You can take this all the way to “bouncy reflections that recycle and reverberate forever”, or just for having a bright reverb, albeit one that you can fine-tune with the Damping control.
Ledges can be run in two operating modes, Live Mode, a WYSIWYG mode which the pedal sounds just as its controls would suggest, and in Preset Mode, where you can just ignore the controls and recall your presets.
There are six presets in total. You can assume greater control over the unit by hooking up an expression pedal. Within each preset, you can get the expression pedal to control different parameters.
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You don’t even need a guitar. You can hook this up to an digital piano, drum machine, bass guitar, synthesizer.
In keeping with the other pedals in EQD’s current range, Ledges comes equipped with Flexi-Switch Technology for momentary or latching operation. It is buffered bypass, and takes 9V DC from a pedalboard power supply.
It is priced £225/$199 and is available now. For more details, head over to EarthQuaker Devices.
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Jonathan Horsley has been writing about guitars and guitar culture since 2005, playing them since 1990, and regularly contributes to MusicRadar, Total Guitar and Guitar World. He uses Jazz III nylon picks, 10s during the week, 9s at the weekend, and shamefully still struggles with rhythm figure one of Van Halen’s Panama.
“We are honoured that our company’s relationship with the legendary guitar player continues to this day”: Dunlop salutes wah pedal pioneer Eric Clapton with a gold-plated signature Cry Baby
“Honestly I’d never even heard of Klons prior to a year-and-a-half ago”: KEN Mode’s Jesse Matthewson on the greatest reverb/delay ever made and the noise-rock essentials on his fly-in pedalboard