Boss FRV-1 Reverb Pedal >
It’s the sound that launched the surf music craze in the early '60s, and Boss have brought it back into the twenty first century with the new addition to their Fender stompbox range, the FRV-1 Reverb Pedal.
The pedal is fashioned in the usual Boss shape that seems to have remained unchanged since the '80s; if you’ve ever used these pedals on stage you’ll know they’re built to last, and they look great too. The FRV-1 is extremely simple to use, with only three knobs for adjusting the tone, mix and ‘dwell’ of the sound, but does it sound like an original Fender valve reverb? Well, the consensus seems to be that it’s pretty close, although to our ears it sounds slightly flat and lifeless when directly compared to the original. But stick it in a mix, or crank it up at a gig and we don’t think this will be an issue for most players. In fact, the FRV-1 sounds so good that the only people who’ll be grumbling will be the purists who would never be happy without the real thing. Guitarists will love the characteristic metallic ‘twang’ or ‘boinkiness’ that this pedal gives them; this is the dirty spring-reverb vibe that became a staple of rockabilly, blues and latterly grunge too. You can almost smell the dust on the valves and taste the grit in the sound!
So what else would you use it for? The FRV-1 would be ideal for dub mixes, where you throw individual hits from the mixing desk into an old reverb unit, King Tubby style. It breathes life into vintage samples too, but primarily this unit is for the live player, ideally suited to guitarists and at 99GBP, a bit of a bargain, especially when you consider how expensive (if not impossible) it would be to find a genuine vintage Fender Reverb unit!
Written by: Steve Hillier
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