[playingdead]

Can any of the experts out there explain this phenomenon to me?

I just did some testing with a Trio preamp (see the other thread for details) but one thing was puzzling to me.

I ran my Tiger guitar into a Holy Grail reverb pedal set on the spring setting, depth at about 12 o'clock, which is a fairly subtle amount of reverb (that's how I prefer it).

In the Clean channel (blackface Twin) it sounds just right.

In the Mean channel (sort of a Marshall/plexi setup) the signal had a ton more reverb on it ... but I didn't change the pedal setting.

In the Scream channel, which is a ton of high gain, the sound was absolutely drenched in reverb.

Why does this happen?

[jonarobb]

It's a common complaint with the EH Holy Grail, among other things. Your Trio's gain stages are amplifiying the EH's digital reverb signal exponentially. You would get the same thing with any amp with multiple gain stages. That's the layman's description. If it bothers you, try putting it in front of the preamp, as in an effects loop. I found the Holy Grail to be painfully noisy. EH pedals in general have become very amateurish in both quality of build and perceivable tone. I've checked out your rig and your playing and touch are exceptional, very good stuff. I'm surprised you're using the Holy Grail.

Have you seen or used this before?

http://www.vanamps.com/reverbamate.htm

A cat had one at the NY Amp Show last year and it literally was the most amazing thing I'd heard in a while as far as outboard units go.

[playingdead]

It's not bothering me as much as puzzling me; I never understood why I had the same issue with the onboard spring reverb in my old Boogie amps, you couldn't ever balance the reverb from channel to channel.

I totally agree on the EH pedals; I had to try four of these before I got a quiet one. The others were hissy as hell. It's roughly on a par with the reverb in my 73 Twin head sonically; if I used more reverb, it might bother me more, but I just use a taste of it.

Interestingly, I was looking at the gear that Ryan Adams and the Cardinals used on their acoustic tour in 07, which was great sounding stuff, particularly on the pedal steel, and there were Holy Grails all over the stage.

The Reverbamate looks interesting; wish they made a rack version of it. I had a Real Tube Reverb briefly, and it sounded good, but even at that it wasn't noticeably better than the Holy Grail in the overall context of my sound, at least with the little bit I use it for.

Thanks for the kind words ...

Vic