PlanetZ forums - scopeusers.com

Hi all!

You'd think, being the painfully simple mechanical beasts that they are, that hardware spring reverbs are cheap as chips. Well, apparently not... go on, do a quick eBay search for 'spring reverb'... £200-plus for a fucking spring in a box!!! Sod that.

Anyway, at the moment I'm using my guitar amp as one (line into amp input, tapping off the reverb unit's output at the back, going back into scope). This works pretty well, but it's noisy as fuck... does anyone have a dedicated line-input one (I'm pretty sure Jimmy does!), and can they tell me if they're particularly noisy?

Also, does anyone have any recommended units I should keep an eye out for? I'm looking to spend not much more than 50 quid... is that unrealistic, do you think?

Cheers!

Chris

go find an old busted guitar amp that happens to have the spring in it.
i even have a dinky little practice amp with one.
take out the spring. throw the rest away.
very simple electronics to drive it, basically a low power amplifier at the send end, and a preamp at the receive end.

The main thing with stuff like that. dont make a project out of looking for it,
just look out for it, and once you are actually paying attention, you will probably find one soon (and probably other cool things)

Or you could try one of the PiAi kits:

http://www.paia.com/proddetail.asp?prod=6740K&cat=27

$101 = about 68 quid at the moment.

That's intruguing... might ask Craig about that one actually. The only thing is:

You know the problems with spring reverbs - nearly all of them are twangy, boingy, bassy, boomy and noisy. But the Hot Springs is none of these.

Apart from the 'noisy' bit, I actually want twang, boing, bass and boom! It's for dub reggae, see... also, to optimise that kit for line-level signals I'd probably need to chuck an amp of some sort in there.

Of which... do you reckon I could get a cleaner sound out of my guitar-amp-turned-spring-reverb if, instead of going in through the amp's input, I chucked a line-level signal through a mic pre, and output that directly to the Accutronics box, with the output of that going back into Scope?

Cheers!

Chris

most spring reverb preamps were very cheap things, however the output lends itself nicely to a balanced modern opamp preamp, which could be made very quiet with decent shielding and construction.

I've read good things about the Vesta Fire RV-1 & RV-2. The RV-1 is a 1u rack unit & is mono, while the RV-2 is a 2u rack unit & is stereo. I think the RV-2 is more versatile as the springs can be switched between a parallel or series configuration. A working RV-2 shouldn't cost more than around £70. They're supposed to sound better than a GBS.

Mark

I loved to hit mine when I had one.

Had a quick look for info on that Paia kit since it looks like an interesting project & came across this thread with lots of spring recommendations & some nice info re the Paia kit. - http://www.gearslutz.com/board/low-end- ... everb.html

Mark

Btw, the Paia kit doesn't come with an amp, but you can choose from several which they sell cheap. Also, it looks like you'd need to buy 2 kits to make a stereo unit which would have 4 springs.

Mark