Carl Martin HeadRoom
126 Guitarist February 2012
Photo gr aPhy by J osePh b rans ton
£249
EffEcts
Carl Martin
HeadRoom
£249
It’s springtime for your pedalboard, thanks to this
analogue spring reverb pedal by Trevor Curwen
T
here are plenty of digital
pedals around that aim to
emulate the sound of
spring reverb. Many of them, it
has to be said, do an extremely
good job of it, but for some
players it has to be the real thing
in all of its electro-mechanical
glory. So, if that’s you, how do
you go about adding spring
reverb to your rig?
Well, you can target an amp
with a built-in spring, assuming
that the rest of that amp’s sound
and features are to your taste
and that you can actually justify
a change of amps. Then again
you can add the daddy of them
all to your existing set-up – a
standalone Fender Spring
Reverb – but that’s going to be
expensive and maybe just a
little inconvenient for onstage
use. The third way is to buy a
real spring reverb in a pedal –
conveniently at your feet and
always ready for action. By
necessity, any spring reverb
pedal would have to be a pretty
large to fit those springs in but
the HeadRoom, the latest from
Carl Martin, is not excessively
large, being about the size of
two Big Muffs side-by-side.
What’s more, it can run off a
PP3 or a standard 9V adaptor,
saving even further on
pedalboard space.
A single input and output
unit, the HeadRoom helpfully
offers two reverb depths
(A and B), each with their own
chickenhead knobs controlling
tone and level. Two nicely
spaced footswitches take care
of all the action – one to bypass
the unit and the other to switch
between sounds A and B.
Alternatively, if you want to put
the pedal somewhere safe, you
also get the facility to add
remote footswitches to take
over the switching duties.
Sounds
An Accutronics three-spring
unit similar to those found in
smaller Fender amps is at the
heart of the HeadRoom and the
sound is familiarly Fender-like.
Generated from the same
springs, the A and B reverbs are
identical, the differences
between the two being totally
dependent on knob positioning.
The level knob takes you from a
totally dry sound through to a
deep surf twang and all points
in between, while turning the
The HeadRoom offers two footswitchable depths of analogue reverb
GIT351.rev_carl.indd 126 12/20/11 4:45:41 PM