Best Reverb Pedals for Acoustic Guitar – Lush Ambience!

The chassis isn’t really a beautifully grained piece of wood: it just looks like that. Regardless, it looks right at home at an acoustic-forward folk style gig. The aesthetics of a pedal aren’t the most important thing, but a careful design does inspire confidence in the product.

With this pedal, the main thing I enjoy is how it attempts to replicate my unplugged tone, and add reverb on top. I’m already an avid user of the LR Baggs Para DI, so it’s no surprise that the natural, woody sound of my guitar is loyally emphasized here.

My main acoustic guitar is my parlor-sized Takamine New Yorker. As a smaller guitar, it lacks the natural reverberation of, say, a dreadnought, especially when played through a PA. This is where the Align helps out quite a bit: it adds a much-needed “bigness” to the tone.

The controls are intuitive and easy to use: I simply set the Volume knob to match my dry sound, and used the Tone control to decide if I wanted a darker, more foreboding reverb or a brighter shimmering sound. For acoustic guitar, I err on the side of warmth.

The reverb control offers plenty of echo and depth. I am a particular fan of the Decay control, which determines the speed with which the reverb cuts out. Everything from a lush, dense chorus-like tail to shorter, more natural-sounding reverb is on offer here.

Overall, an excellent pedal from an excellent builder.

As a major selling point for me, it’s much smaller than many effects units. It’s a similar size to the Ibanez Tube Screamer mini, so it’s easy to slot into my pedalboard. The lack of a battery option does mean I’m restricted to gigs with mains power (or using a battery power source) but that’s a minor hurdle.

The layout here is simple: spring, plate, and hall reverbs on offer as a starting point, and manipulation thereof for volume, tone, and decay.

The spring reverb is pretty much useless for acoustic guitar: it’s much too amp-like for my taste.

The plate verb is more applicable, but by far my favorite tone was the hall reverb, which, as the name implies, just sounds like the echo of a large empty room.

I know that many modern guitar players like to endlessly tweak their reverb sounds, but that’s not really an option here. There’s really not too much variation available from tweaking the knobs: none of the sounds are unusable, and they’re all well within the expected range of an acoustic instrument.

As a highly portable, highly utilitarian pedal for acoustic guitar running straight into a PA, it’s hard to argue with the Fishman Acoustiverb.

At first glance, the Cloudburst features a dazzling array of knobs and switches. Oddly enough, this is one of the more intuitive designs in the Strymon catalog! The basic idea here is that every function and feature of the reverb effect has a dedicated control.

It’s pretty and sparkly right out of the box, with a sky-blue finish that conjures images of fair weather and calming, ambient, echoing tones.

The basic tone here, with all knobs set to twelve o’clock, is noticeably ethereal. It adds density and texture to single-note lines that would make a choir of angels blush.

I actually found that it’s easy to dial in too much ‘verb for my liking, especially on acoustic guitar. It adds to and complements the natural ambience of an acoustic guitar, adding layers and warbles far beyond those the instrument can produce itself.

When I was in high school, I played acoustic guitar in a cathedral for a school event. At rehearsals, in that big, empty stone room, every chord rang out and bounced off the walls. It was a full, rich, inspiring sound that I can still hear in my head to this day.

With the Strymon, I could capture that sound, or at least the memory of it, through my PA with my parlor body Takamine.

The most likely use case for this pedal, at least for me, is a warm, welcoming, natural-sounding reverb for solo gigs, but the options really feel limitless here. One feature I found particularly enticing was the option to add octaves up or down, lending much-needed unison bass or twelve-string-esque tones to my live sound.

It’s Keeley, so the build quality is appreciably high, with a reassuringly weighty metal chassis and a big, friendly footswitch to stomp on.

For acoustic guitar, the Spring reverb setting isn’t that useful. It’s too, well, springy for my taste. With a Stratocaster or Jazzmaster you’d be in the zone for awesome surf-rock tones, but that’s not what I’m here for.

The Plate reverb setting, too, feels more tailored to an electric guitar’s tonal palette than that of an acoustic guitar. It sounds great, but to me it feels more like a studio-added after-effect than a natural acoustic reverberation.

The “Soft Focus” setting is probably the most useful for solo acoustic guitarists who just want some natural ambience. Even with both control knobs set neutrally, it offered, as the name implies, a soft, easy-going reverb ideal for adding space and depth to an acoustic tone.

I found it particularly useful while fingerpicking. A dry guitar signal through a PA while playing fingerstyle can be, at times, a little too harsh. With the Soft Reverb, I was able to sweeten up my fingerstyle playing, and it was a real joy running through Hozier’s “Cherry Wine” and “In A Week” on this setting.

I found the “Level” knob particularly useful for tailoring the amount of reverb in my signal to the room. Some rooms have natural reverb of their own, especially those with higher ceilings and harder walls. Being able to pull back when required, while keeping enough in the tone for it to stay sweet and ambient, is a welcome addition.

Of course, I’m talking about acoustic guitar today. The key word when it comes to adding effects to acoustic guitar is restraint: even maxed out, the M300 doesn’t descend into unusable swirling noise. At full throttle, it’s far more reverb than I’d like for my acoustic live tone, but it’s still a worthwhile, recognizable guitar tone.

The LED lights on this pedal are notably bright. I recently played an outdoor show with this pedal in the middle of the day and the blue LED was still visible, even in broad daylight! On a dark club stage, it’s bright enough you’d be tempted to open a book and read by it.

The three-knob layout will be familiar to MXR enthusiasts, and I was pleased to see additional button functionality on the Tone knob, which allowed me to cycle through each of the built-in reverb types in this pedal.

Although the Spring and Epic tones are very nice, and I’d be happy to use them in an electric band (especially if we were playing U2 covers), for acoustic guitar, by far the most useful setting is the one marked “Room.”

With tweaks of the Decay and Mix knobs, it’s possible to emulate the sounds of rooms of varying sizes and reverberation levels, from living rooms to empty churches. It’s a remarkable feat of audio engineering.

My only complaint with this pedal, as far as playing acoustic guitar goes, is that the functionality might actually be too much. There’s even an option to deputize an expression pedal to allow you to blend different reverb sounds together! For me, that’s more than I want for acoustic performance, although more avant-garde players than I will embrace this broad-ranging functionality.