Tomkat's latest Super Heavy Reverb Pedal is a Super Massive Black Hole of a Reverb with additional Delay and Drive Elements

Tom Kogut’s new pedal is named after the largest ever space rocket made to date - the SpaceX Super Heavy First Stage Booster Rocket - designed for sending the largest of payloads into space!

Let’s hope the pedal is not as prone to exploding as the device it gets its moniker from - while it is of course highly explosive in the Reverb dimension.

This is Tom’s first new pedal in around 6 years I believe - following on from his inestimably cool Cloudy Digital Multi Effect - which took me a long time to secure - what with somewhat randomized micro-batches which seemed to appear very infrequently. Hopefully this new one will be easier to get your hands on!

I can’t but think - from the styling and description of the pedal that this should have been called something like the Super Massive Black Hole - but alas that name or variations thereof are already taken by Eventide and Muse!

In any case we have an intriguing colour-coded control topology - where the outer 7 knobs light up in 4 colours - White, Magenta, Red and Amber - which each controls up to 7 different parameters. The central non-lit-up dial switches between the 4 colour-coded control clusters - and causes the orbiting knobs to change to that appropriate colour.

The 4 clusters are as follows :

• White [Universal] : 1 Input Gain | 2 Chain Mix | 3 Delay Mix | 4 Drive Mix | 5 Drive Amnt | 6 Reverb Mix | 7 Output Gain
• Magenta [Reverb]  : 1 Pre Gain | 2 Size (Reverb) | 3 Damp (Top End) | 4 Pre Delay | 5 HPF (Low End) | 6 Width (Stereo) | 7 Post Gain
• Amber [Delay] : 1 Delay Mix | 2 Time (Delay) | 3 (Feedback) | 4 Type
• Red [Drive] : 1 Drive Mix | 2 Pre Gain | 3 Drive Amnt | 4 Asym (Clipping) | 5 Type

Alas there is no manual yet - so no reference to that the Delay and Drive Types might be - while the demo videos give you some clues.

The left Footswitch activates Infinite Freeze / Pads, while the right Engages the pedal.

There are 5 rear ports - Left In, Right In, Left Out, Right Out, and 9V DC [-] (350mA?).

If you hate secondary, tertiary and quaternary / Alt Parameters - then this pedal is not for you - It’s generally a wonderful exploration into the spatial dimension. It truly sounds ’immensely’ impressive. The only slight flaw is the lack of Analog Dry-Thru - so that this Digital Effect will impact the fidelity of your signal chain to a degree.

That said - if you’re into massive big reverbs - then this is a really intriguing new take on that - I really rather like it, while I’ve yet to make up my mind as to whether this is essential for me!

The Super Heavy Reverb is available for orders right now on the Tomcat Webstore - where it goes for $350 / €338 / £279.