Tone Report Weekly Issue 86 | Page 52

ALEXANDER PEDALS GOLDEN SUMMER REVIEW BY ERIC TISCHLER STREET PRICE $189.00 The marketing copy around Alexander’s Golden Summer Ambient Reverberator evokes a sense of nostalgia, invoking “mom” and “neverending summer.” Now, I was in my early 20s when Slowdive’s Souvlaki came out, so maybe I’m older than the target audience, but “Ambient Reverberator?” That I get. Golden Summer provides reverb—and gobs of it— but it doesn’t go for a spring reverb vibe or a recognizable acoustic space (although it does very well at providing the latter, if not the former), but is based on a “virtual reverb chamber.” 52 GEAR REVIEW // Plug in and, at almost any setting, you get lots of dreamy, shimmering space. How dreamy and how shimmering is determined by the pedal’s deceptively elaborate controls. Golden Summer offers the standard Reverb (depth of the reverb chamber), Mix (which controls that amount of the effect that’s applied to your signal) and Delay (the amount of time between the initial clean note and the onset of the effect…usually; more on that in a moment). The Golden Summer then adds a three-way toggle for three Alexander Pedals Golden Summer different settings, and a Tweak control that affects how those settings are applied to the signal. In the Mod setting, Golden Summer offers its least shimmery (read: most traditional) setting with the Tweak knob at noon. However, as you move the knob in either direction, you add tremolo-like modulation to the trails; clockwise is slower, counter-clockwise is faster. With a distorted, busier part, there’s a My Bloody Valentine-esque pitch-shifting feel with these settings that adds texture without calling attention to itself. With a cleaner signal