Death by Reverb - Creating Fun Echo Effects!

Many guitar amplifiers include a built-in reverb setting. Since the 1960s it is one of the most common effects added to electric guitar. These days most reverb is added digitally, but there are some true analog versions out there including Anasounds' spring reverb system (which looks and sounds exceedingly cool!). Most amplifier effects are essentially one knob which adds progressively more reverb creating essentially a larger echo chamber for the sound, but there are other ways to manipulate reverberation digitally to create the illusion of playing in anything from a cave to a large room or even hyperspace if you want to get fairly crazy. Death by Audio's Reverberation Machine is billed as a "synthetic atmosphere creator." Guitar PCB Mania has a version of this circuit called the Death by Reverb which relies on a Belton reverb module for part of the build. It appears to be an "inspired by" rather than an absolute copy, but the controls are fairly similar.

As you can see from the top view, the main part of the PCB is fairly small, but incredibly dense. There isn't a lot of room for error, and you have to choose your components (especially film capacitors) fairly carefully to ensure they fit onto the board without too much trouble. The LM7805 regulator I used is the larger type (as it was what I could easily lay my hands on) and is likely overkill for this particular application, but hey, it works! I also managed to score the TLC27 chip that the board is designed to work with.

A lot of the heavy lifting for the pedal is done by the Belton module on the back. There are a variety of these digital modules available, and I just grabbed the one that was recommended in the kit instructions. I honestly don't know enough about the guts of these to make a reasonable substitution. The leads for the brick pass through the board and can be seen to the left of the PCB Mania logo at the top of the PCB. It was really easy to get soldered in, but obviously has to be done after all of the other components are attached!

As the PCB itself is pretty small, it very easily fits into the 125B enclosure with a fair amount of room left over. I went ahead and used the 3PDT board from PCB Mania to make the final wiring of this pedal a bit easier. I also went with the standard star pattern ground I use on Aion FX pedals, and it fired up first time!

For the pedal artwork, I decided to stick with something simple, yet appropriate. As this is "death by reverb" I immediately thought of the Decepticon Soundwave from the 1980s cartoon show. This is a fun little pedal, but it is also sort of a "special use" case type of pedal - when you need it you need it, but a lot of the time I won't just based on the genres I'm playing at this point. If I want to start going for an earlier reverb sound, I can see it coming in really handy at that point. The Reverberation Machine isn't terribly expensive at $225, but I was likely able to build my version for no more than 1/3rd of that.