fx pedal for "surf" music...??

[bwanasonic]

   "i want to give a birthday present (stompbox) to a pal that play the surf and nothing but the surf"...  " so what should i look for/ build...

If your friend already plays surf music, I would suggest a puka shell necklace, Hawaiian shirt, or a set of 12s (Unless you can find a good deal on a vintage Mosrite). They probably already have the reverb delay thing covered, or else they are not actually playing surf music.

K

[edvard]

Digitals and BBD's never did it for me either, so I'm gonna go along with conventional wisdom here and tell you to stick with springs.
Drive it with a LM386, pick it up with anything else, mix to taste.

Start here: http://www.electronicsteacher.com/circuits-and-diagrams/music-related-schematics/p34-fig3.gif

There are a lot of places that sell spring tanks, anywhere from 1-3 springs.
The more springs, the bigger and more natural the sound can get.
You could also take one out of an old busted organ or cheap amp if you just want to experiment.

Somewhere I acquired a Hammond spring set with a busted transducer that's small enough to fit in a 1590BB 
I don't know if you can get anything like it today, I'll post pics when I can find it again...

[tubelectron]

They say the Holy Grail sounded so much like a Fender tube reverb that Dick Dale couldn't tell the difference.

That's true. I have a Holy Grail reverb Nano : it can really compete with my Twin/Deluxe/Princeton Reverb amps SF, which all have top reverb sounds. The Hol Grail Nano is a great bargain !

A+!

[Bullet79]

not to be mistaken..........

[Hides-His-Eyes]

Also, I've heard from more than one place that 9V does not cut it when driving a reverb tank, and that you should aim for nearer three times that.

[Top Top]

I've never heard digital that does a spring really well when heard out in the open (not buried with a bunch of other stuff).

There are some that can sort of fake it, but as soon as it is by itself, you can hear that it is an emulation and not the real thing. Even a plate seems easier to emulate digitally. Springs are just too low tech for digital. I am sure I will be proven wrong in the next 10 years though.

[Taylor]

I've never heard digital that does a spring really well when heard out in the open (not buried with a bunch of other stuff).

There are some that can sort of fake it, but as soon as it is by itself, you can hear that it is an emulation and not the real thing. Even a plate seems easier to emulate digitally. Springs are just too low tech for digital. I am sure I will be proven wrong in the next 10 years though.

Yeah, I don't think it's impossible (as I said above I think NI B4 does it really well, and lets you continuously control the length of the springs!) - it's just that I don't think the people designing pedals at Boss and Line 6 really care about the grimy surf and junk music musicians. They are catering to the much larger market of aging baby boomers playing blues-rock kind of stuff who just want a little bit of verb. So it's not worth all the extra time developing a really complex spring emulation with Karplus-Strong algorithms for the small subset of people who want to sound like they're playing in a rusted metal cube.

What I'd love is a real spring reverb that sounded like my old Premier 90 unit, but without the loud hum and electric shock you'd get every time you adjusted a knob. I've owned several spring verbs and none sounded as good as that one, setting aside the risk of death.

[petemoore]

  A Holy Grail, an Accutronics Medium/long tank w/12uX7's el84-Recto-tube reverb circuit [deluxe tube reverb], an Echo Park, and a Proverb.
  Any one or pair of these can Surf.
  The Tube Reverb...you Can hear the tube sound in it, using SS driver/mixer components like my AC-15CCI does isn't the same either.
  Seems reduckulous that reverb must be large heavy item, and isn't in many cases because it is simply to large, cumbersome, requires it's own settin' spot and power supply and patch cables. It ends up one or two of the other pedals surf just fine and leave me with more surfin' energy by the time I get to the breakers.

[Quackzed]

im surprised no one mentioned a treble booster...
i'd say a treble booster into a clean amp with the reverb cranked should get you in the ballpark...

[diemilchmann]

this one always amazes me

http://www.youtube.com/user/Effectology#p/u/14/uAiUMx1Dsm4

[tubelectron]

Hi,

If you take the 4AB3C1B long reverb tank, you may find uneven quality sounding, like I often heard it when restoring/building and servicing amps. Finding a really ggod-sounding reverb tank is not so immediate. And like on a VOX AC15CC1, a Fender Blues Junior, an Ampeg Jet J12-T RI, a small tank spring reverb doesn't sound as well as a long tank. Many digital reverb I had in hands were room, hall, plate reverbs and indeed were not sounding like spring reverb (some of them were sounding like... Junk !), but - trust me - the HolyGrail Nano by EH really sounds "spring reverb" nearly like the best real spring ones I heard. A really good imitation in a stompbox size.

A+!

[PRR]

> if i play "surf" music... what is the most vital fx's stompbox i should use..??

To do it "right", you need standalone reverb, grid-bias tremolo, wammy bar, and tubes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surf_music

> my Twin/Deluxe/Princeton Reverb amps SF, which all have top reverb sounds.

Well.... the Original is still the best: a standalone reverb with a large 6F6 driving the tank. The on-board Twin-etc reverbs with 12AT7 driver are 80% of that: excellent for every normal use, but NOT a here-to-Java booooooing like the standalone unit.

I was on the beach when Mr Dale was starting out, before he and Fender really got their stuff together. I do not know if I heard Dale himself, but a lot of guys like him. I moved away and spent a lot of my career working with various reverbs.

But let's be realistic. The audience can be classified in two groups.

• Born too late, never knew what real Surf Music sounded like....
• The older gang, heard the real stuff, but 50 years of many kinds of LOUD has dulled our perceptions (and memories).

So unless you are auditioning for a remake of Beach Blanket Bingo, some heavy reverb and tremolo is good enough for everybody in the audience. I won't chortle if you use a $69 99-FX digi-pedal, as long as you have the "feel" of Long Beach 1959.

> a puka shell necklace, Hawaiian shirt

That and a collection of 45s (like large black CDs except you need a funny player) is maybe more important than your hardware.

[wavley]

https://taweber.powweb.com/store/kits_weber.htm#5H15T

Surf music was my first love.  I don't surf much anymore since my hip got crushed and I moved to the mountains, but everybody is right... fender guitar, external reverb, trem, cranked amp, maybe a little slapback if you want to get crazy, something like an RE-201 space echo would get you close enough for rock and roll.  As a kid I used a Mustang, RE-101 space echo, a Sansui RA-500, and a traynor YSR-1 on a Showman 212 and a silverface Vibrolux.  It was all CHEAP stuff back then, now it's classic, wish I still had that reverb even though these days I wouldn't dream of using it for guitar, all the other stuff still gets daily use.

[markeebee]

As Bwanasonic says, your mate probably already has his reverb requirements covered, but I bet he doesn't have a BOIIINNNGGGG BOX!

I've got a Spring King reverb stomp.  As reverbs go, it's absolute pants.  But it does have a couple of springs in that go BOIIINNNGGGG when you kick the box, so I keep it just for that.  The joke wears pretty thin after a while (story of my life!) so I've restricted myself to two boings per set, which make each boing kinda expensive because the box takes up a fair amount of real estate.  But, honestly, every BOIIINNNGGGG is priceless.

So, I reckon, make up some springs by winding some solid conductor around a pencil, or use Strat trem springs, or some other spring that I can't think of.  Mount in a BB box with a buffer, piezo and a gain stage of some sort, plus a stomp switch/actuator and......HEY BOIIINNNGGGGO!!!!

Just a thought. Others will have a much better way of doing it.

[edvard]

Found my Hammond mini-spring reverb unit.
(hit the link for the text of the sticker)
Anything like it made these days?

http://www.aronnelson.com/gallery/main.php/v/edvard/hammond_mini_spring.JPG.html


In a pedal, it'd make an excellent BOIIINNNGGGG  box!

[wavley]

This is my favorite reverb sticker, makes me happy every time I turn the reverb knob on my space echo that it was manufactured by beautiful girls.

[Top Top]

This is my favorite reverb sticker, makes me happy every time I turn the reverb knob on my space echo that it was manufactured by beautiful girls.

And that the beautiful girls were treated properly by providing them controlled atmosphere conditions.

What's with Wisconsin and reverb springs?

[g.]

you can try to find this small BST spring reverb

[petemoore]

  What you could to then
           Vs.
  What you can do now:
  Pros:
  Same thing, patch something together which is totally scratched from scratch {examples:
  The oil tank out back, the plate of stuff that verberates, the springs from the other thing [combined with some 'tech' stuff like mic/speaker/amp/preamp/TC etc..
  Or combine that scratch 'n patchwork it with some well engineered units like Leo designed.
  Spring King cited as interesting endeavor, the use of springs for various needs [to satisfy the need for boing-0, and 'more accurate' chips to create the long time constant verberations, which should tend to keep the long-spring mush out of the unit. I guess...
  Long springs are cool for surf but don't do the short-spring sound without too much verb-drone and tend to mush up, especially when fed multiple pitches, chord [even fast-ish note leads] multi-note-definition suffers. 
  Ie for complex input, long springs mush things up.
  Short springs don't do long verbs, they do fill-tone work very well without garbling it up much.
  At first I thought the S-K was appealing as a fad, springs in the box [similar to some 'has tube in it' marketing vibes], which it is..it does have a spring in it, then after mulling it over it seems like it'll be a good old design one day, it just takes a few days for that to happen.
  It might even be the ultimate chip-spring reverb original to some owners who have tried or own a number of reverbs.
  ...Just like the old days, patch something together or engineer a more perfect unit, use the empty oil tank out back, the plate that verberates or the slinky...or something Leo designed.
  The analog-spring part boiled down:
  Something to drive the spring [plate, coils, air or what have you that is springy and can be driven/picked up and creates spring-soundy type sound]. Gain recovery and mixing with 'input-clean' at the end.
  Verb-tronics boiled down: buy it in a box or on a board, or prepare for a lot of extra boiling.
  The spring-delay combo, albeit new-ish, seems a good one simply for the fact that long springs sound like long springs the whole time, mush can be useful but for general practices w/reverb, something that fills and allows more complex playing without mushing out may become praised as preferable, + it introduces springs into the line without the super long box.