Poly Effects Verbs

US Your tone in amazing spaces      14/12/23

"I've never seen a reverb unit with a dedicated Basilica mode" was my first thought upon seeing Poly Effects' Verbs for the first time. This new impulse response-based reverb unit builds upon the legacy of their original Beebo & Hector units (essentially full modular effects & synthesis environments) yet, unlike those deep & complex rabbit holes, Verbs aims for streamlined approach, with an elegant UI and the entirety of the unit's power dedicated to reverb.

Verbs answers an age old question. Would your guitar (or synth) sound good in the Pantheon of Rome? Or a nuclear reactor hall, a cave, a neolithic tomb, the London Palladium? The answer is yes You have 48 presets with different captures to explore. 8 of these can be filled with imported spaces you can capture yourself. Verbs has zero latency on your dry signal and uses analog dry through, so your dry sound is never converted. As well as unique real spaces, Verbs includes rigorously accurate captures of vintage gear including EMT140 plates, springs, 480L, and an oil can unit.

 

The control surface looks very inviting; the Smoosh control piquing my curiosity. Smoosh apparently "spreads and expands the sound particles to fill the void", mystery solved then! Connectivity options look pretty comprehensive, with a TRS Stereo In & Out, and Midi Type A TRS In & Out. Please note it will do Mono>Mono, Stereo>Stereo, but not Mono>Stereo. MIDI wise, all main controls respond to MIDI CC and the unit responds to both these and program changes on MIDI channels 1-6.

There are a large variety of reverbs on board:

• Pool Of The Blackstar: Spaces famous for their unique audio character, including the longest reverb in the world, a masonic acoustic lens and a sound sculpture.
• Capricornia Caves: Caves and cavernous industrial structures, including a nuclear reactor hall, cooling tower and railway tunnels.
• Santa Lucia Basilica: Religious buildings including the almost 2000 year old pantheon of Rome.
• Echo Plates: Vintage analog reverb plate devices including the famous EMT140.
• Analog Devices: Vintage analog reverb spring and oil can devices including amp style and outboard studio gear.
• Irregular Verbs: Bubbles, rain and unusual IRs that generate granular sounding textures.
• Adverbs: This collection holds imported reverbs and by default includes Maeshowe, a neolithic monument built around 2800 BC. Any of the default reverbs can be found on our website if you save over one that you really like (you can import your own IR's into the pedal).

 

Whilst we've seen Poly wielding this kind of IR tech before (they're pioneers in the field of hardware reverb), the previous implementation in the Beebo/Hector line had an impulse size of 5 seconds. You can use clever patching to chain multiple IR's together, or place the on-board algorithmic reverb afterwards, but this was, nevertheless, a limitation to bump up against.

Verbs, being solely dedicated to reverb, doesn't have this limitation. There is "more than 10 times the IR length" meaning that even the most gigantic spaces can fit in just fine. We look forward to hearing more from Verbs soon.

Posted by MagicalSynthAdventure an expert in synthesis technology from last Century and Amiga enthusiast.

< More From: POLY EFFECTS

• NAMM 2024: Poly Effects - Verbs - Convolution Reverb Pedal 29-Jan-24
• NAMM 2023: Poly Effects - Hector - Beebo - Flat V 18-Apr-23

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