Nobels REV-mini Digital Reverb

Renowned for their legendary ODR-1 overdrive pedal, Nobels are known for bringing sweet dynamic tones to the front of your signal chain. Now Nobels turn its attention to the other end of your chain and introduces the REV-mini, the latest addition to the mini-series that started with a compact version of the ODR-1 in 2018 and grew, little by little, into a family of classic effects.

The REV-mini packs three legendary reverb voices, a pair of cool hidden extra effects and classic Nobels convenience-of-life features into an extremely compact stereo enclosure. Who knew infinite space could take up no space at all!?

Let's start with the sounds. Three carefully crafted reverb models faithfully capture the iconic sounds that have shaped music across genres, past and present, and each one is simply selected by the pedal's convenient mode switch right on the face of the pedal.

Spring is the surf classic, all drip and splash, the kind of reverb that made whole records shimmer in the early sixties. Plate is dense and studio-sized, a wash that stays out of the way until you stop playing and notice it's been holding your tone up all along. Hall goes the other direction entirely, an atmospheric sprawl that turns your held chords into a landscape. Each mode lights the LED its own colour, so you can read the pedal from across a dark stage without ever bending down.

The REV-mini also carries an extra effect, hidden behind a simple hold of the momentary footswitch. On Spring and Hall it's Freeze, catching whatever you're playing and holding it steady underneath you while you solo, tune up or simply listen. On Plate it's Shimmer, an octave-up bloom that drifts in like frost on a window. No menu diving required, just hold the footswitch and find your own sweet spot.

Further defying expectations based on its compact appearance, there are dedicated toggles for selection between mono and stereo (TRS) operation as well as true or buffered bypass modes, making the pedal suitable for almost any musical situation, anywhere, any time. Input and output are both TRS, so using a Y-cable allows you to open your reverbs to full stereo width. True bypass is the purist's choice; the reverb removed entirely from the signal chain when the pedal is off. Buffered keeps your signal intact through long cable runs and crowded pedal boards, which is exactly where a pedal this small tends to land.

As with all other current Nobels pedals, the REV-mini features 4 integrated Mounty-P Mounting Plates for safe and secure attachment to pedalboards, and its Glow in the Dark pointer knobs are a small mercy on a dark stage. The DSP runs at 48 kHz / 32-bit for a 106 dB dynamic range, which means the reverb stays clean and quiet even with the Size knob pointed at the horizon.

Tiny box, massive sound. Big possibilities, small price. With the REV-mini, three legendary reverbs and two hidden extra effects are just a single stomp away.