Anasounds Element Spring Reverb — Anatomy of Guitar Tone

I’m a sucker for drippy spring reverb. I listen to a lot of surf and psychobilly music. You will find records from The Ventures and The Cramps in our vinyl collection.

Spring reverb isn’t just “reverb” to me. It’s an extremely specific flavor. One that just can’t be recreated digitally. Digital technology has come far, but I don’t feel there is a digital equivalent of spring reverb yet.

I use digital reverb when I want that flavor—it definitely has its place. But when it comes to spring reverb, only a spring will do.

There are some limiting factors to adding a real spring reverb to your chain when it isn’t installed in your amp.

The most obvious limitation is size. Springs take up space. This can be problematic when you don’t have much space on your pedal board. My general approach to pedalboards is, if a pedal is a big part of the tone, I make room for it—even if I have to take other pedals off.

I like to use modular pedalboards, meaning I don’t have a static pedal setup. Because I do such a wide variety of work, I need to swap pedals out a lot. This allows me to really get into the character of the material I’m playing.

I don’t mind moving pedals on and off my board as I tend to be pretty particular about authentic sounds.

If I’m doing a surf gig with a non-reverb amp, spring reverb is a must. Other pedals get temporality demoted. To the back of the line!

I’ve used pedals such as the Van Amps Sole Mate. I really liked the sound of their spring reverb. Great tone. But it’s large—about the same size as the Demeter Reverbulator, another fantastic spring reverb pedal.

I’ve often thought it would be nice to have a spring tank that mounts below your pedalboard. Van Amps (out of business) made one for a time. I never got my hands on one.

I was recently on tour with a lot of fly dates. Spring reverb wasn’t absolutely critical, but I did think it would be best to have it.

But didn’t want to give up pedalboard real estate for other pedals that I felt had more priority. For instance, I needed three stages of gain during the show.

My late night web searching and pedal dreaming led me to the Anasounds Element Spring Reverb pedal. Its spring tank can be mounted underneath the pedalboard while the preamp pedal sits on top of the board.

This piqued my interest! It would solve my problem: the preamp pedal that sits on top of the board is about the size of an MXR pedal. I could definitely create enough space for it.

Anasounds offers three different sizes of spring tanks. I don’t have a very large pedalboard—it insures it’s underweight for plane travel.

I ordered all three tanks. I knew the largest one wouldn’t fit below my board but might be useful for the studio.

The Look

I like the look of the etched wood faceplates on the preamp pedal and the spring tanks. The tanks and pedal are both pretty lightweight, adding very little weight to the pedalboard—a plus.

Mounting

Anasounds includes rubber washers that separate the spring tank from the pedalboard. They nicely prevent vibrations from exciting the reverb. I played some loud sub heavy stages with the Element and the spring reverb never freaked out. That’s a great design!

The Sound

I generally blog about gear I love. So I tend not to publish a lot of negative reviews.

I also don’t write reviews until I’ve spent time with each piece. Most of the gear I keep gets used a lot. I use it for long periods and get to know it deeply. So unlike other blogs, I’m no just moving gear in and out to briefly talk about it.

A friend mentioned to me that if everything you write is positive, people won’t trust you. Point well taken. And I’ve already mentioned how picky I am about spring reverb (OK, I’m a snob).

All that said, I have mixed feelings about the Anasounds Element. It doesn’t sounds bad. It actually sounds good. But I don’t find myself getting excited about its its tones.

For the tour I was doing, it served well as a general-purpose spring reverb. I didn’t need a rebellious spring reverb, which I tend to feel the best ones can be.

I needed a spring that was more elevated than a digital spring to wash out my tone a little bit. The Anasounds Element did this perfectly.

But I never felt like it got me into Dick Dale or Ventures territory. It implied those tones, but it didn’t nail them. I think of the Anasounds Element as a more conservative spring reverb. It’s not the spring reverb that hung out on Orchard Street in 1982.

That doesn’t mean it isn’t a great spring reverb. I would say it’s great for pop or other applications where you don’t want the reverb to steal the show. The Anasounds Element will always say please and thank you.

Spring Saturation

Anasounds does offer a spring saturation switch that is meant to turn the Element from banker to activist.

I got some useful tones in the studio from saturation mode. I didn’t find it useful live, however. The saturation was too much and there is such a level discrepancy from the non-saturated mode that it made toggling in the middle of a gig impossible.

One of my favorite features of a real tube spring reverb is the way it saturates. I also love running a real spring reverb into the front end of an amp while pushing the amp. You can also get spring reverb saturation by using a blackface Fender Reverb amp and turning the volume up. As the amp starts to overdrive, so does the reverb. This is a huge part of surf guitar tone.

I believe Anasounds intended to emulate that kind of spring reverb saturation. But it’s much more drastic than I’d like it to be. I wish it were adjustable.

Noise

Spring reverbs are noisy. No way around that. If it’s a real spring, there is more noise. The additional preamp stage is always going to add noise.

This is the case with reverb on an amp, the Demeter Reverbulator, the VanAmps Sole- Mate, the ValveTrain and every analog spring. They all induce more noise into your signal.

I’m not shy about noise. I use fuzz pedals and Marshall amps regularly.

That said, I didn’t find the EQ knobs all that usable on the Anasounds Element. I won’t say they didn’t make a difference. I could hear a difference with both the bass and treble. But I had a hard time turning the Treble knob beyond 10am without high-end noise becoming too much of an issue.

I heard hissing through my amp—loud enough to annoy me and others on-stage.

1/8 Jack

While on tour I also had issues with reliability. Sometimes the Anasounds Element produced no reverb. The light was on and sound came out, but it was 100% dry.

I found this frustrating. There were times when I’d be recoding a live performance or playing a festival and needed the Anasounds Element to work. No time for messing around with a pedal. Luckily I had my Strymon El Capistan with its hidden spring reverb sound. This bought me time to reach down and play with the 1-8’ jack that sends signal to the spring reverb tank.

That was one of my first concerns when I received the pedal. My general experience with 3.5mm cables isn’ great. I wish Anasounds had used another type of cable connection.

I contacted Anasounds about it. They said the issues were likely due to the 1/8” cable. They suggested I buy another 1/8” cable and try. This frustrated me. The cable isn’t that expensive (under $10 on Amazon). But I was disappointed Anasounds didn’t just ship me a new cable, since my pedal was still under warranty and just a couple of months old.

A NYC guitarist/friend had also messaged me around the same time asking if i had any issues with the Element. Turns out he was having the same issues. So it doesn’t appear this is isolated. This is concerning for touring and session musicians.

My friend was considering modding his to accept a different jack type. I foresee this 1/8” jack connection continuing to be an issue. I did upgrade to a better 1/8” cable and it solved my issue.

Digital

The Anasounds Element is not a fully 100% analog spring reverb like the Demeter Reverburator. It uses a digital processor. I can hear it. I think that might be what keeps its wow factor low. This is not to say it sounds bad—it doesn’t. But it lacks the oomph of an analog spring reverb.

A Good Utility Spring

I Anasounds can fix the 1/8” jack issues, this pedal is a ok spring reverb option for those who don’t need an aggressive spring reverb sound. The Element always sat in the mix well, even when I cranked the reverb. It didn’t take over. It’s mostly a pleasing sound except for the saturation option which I found unusable. I would say overall it doesn’t have an overwhelming amount of character. I happen to really like character.

For the many guitarists out there who aren’t looking for a ton of character, the Anasounds Element is an upgrade from a fully digital spring, but nowhere near the Demeter Reverbulator.