TC Electronic Hall Of Fame Reverb Review

This is my review of the TC Electronic Hall Of Fame Reverb that was just released for general availability in March of 2011. The hype on this thing is of course that it's the latest and greatest reverb out there. They all say that and depending on your preferences and uses for reverb you may or may not agree. There is and will be tons of YouTube reviews of this device with a standard guitar but this review will focus on its use with the pedal steel guitar! You can read all about this on the TC Electronic web site and many other places. The one really unique feature is that you can download custom settings called TonePrints. These will be developed by your "guitar heroes" (whoopee!) but who cares unless this unit has stellar capabilities and really good presets as supplied by the factory. As of this writing there are no additional TonePrints available for the Hall Of Fame other than the one provided on the unit. Note that internally this is just an audio signal processor with various algorithms for delay, chorus, reverb,etc. Theoretically you could program this to do a Delay and a reverb all in one unit like the RV-3 but so far TC has not committed to make the programming software available to the general public.

Link To Hall Of Fame Reverb At Musician's Friend

Link To Hall Of Fame Reverb At TC Electronic

Link To Hall Of Fame Reverb TonePrint page

Statue Of A Fool Recorded with pedal steel

My Impressioms Of This Unit

I agonized over buying this unit, the Nova Reverb and the Wet Reverb. Most of my experience with reverb is with the Boss RV-5, Digitech RV-7, Lexicon MPX1, Line 6 Verbzilla and the classic black and silver face Fender reverbs. Up to this point I actally favored the RV-5 for its lush hall reverbs and versatiliy of going to mod reverb or plate reverb in a hurry when desired. None of these reverbs, including the Hall Of Fame is anywhere near as lush as the MPX1. You can hear all the reverb modes in the samples below. I tried to dampen the strings here and there on all the samples so you can hear the reverb trails.

My overall impression of the Hall Of Fame is that it is a great unit but differs from the RV-5 in a few key areas. The Church mode (really it's a Cathedral!) is very similar to the RV-5 Hall mode but the Hall Of Fame Hall mode is not very lush! The Hall Of Fame seems to have a very short initial reflection time almost like using a short reverb tank whereas the RV-5 seems to have multiple reflections that all blend together into one smooth sound. With the Hall Of Fame you can hear very distinct echoes in the Hall and Church reverbs. This makes them a bit less lush than the RV-5 but also seems to have the benefit of sounding like an RV-3 with both Hall and delay on at the same time. With the Hall Of Fame tone control set at 12:00 or higher or with the Delay set higher than 1:00, these echoes in the reverb are somewhat pronounced. Overall though, the Hall Of Fame reverbs don't suffer from the slight raspy highs that are in the RV-5. The RV-5 does not have a pre-delay switch but I noticed that the dry sound stands out more clearly on the RV-5. Maybe I'm missing something but I could not see where the long and short pre-delay switch made any difference in the sound. I read a ton of reviews on different sites for these and other units. The RV-5 and the Hall Of Fame are both fine units and you will really need to try them for yourself to decide between them and other quality units like the Wet Reverb and the RV-7 to mention a few. In no way can I say that the Hall Of Fame Reverb is stellar or at the head of the pack. It's a quality unit for it's price range and it's reverb sounds and algorithms do differ from the other units.

I also recorded Statue Of A Fool with the Hall Of Fame set on Church mode, Decay at 1:00, Level at 1:30, Tone at 9:00.