BILL HOLLAND: Welcome back to Gearwire.Com. My name is Bill Holland, and you are looking at the ART Proverb. This is a reverb unit made by ART, and I picked up this recently for pretty cheap actually. Actually, I wouldn't recommend paying over $50 for one of these they're old 80s digital reverb units, but they're useful for a few different things. The reason we picked this up was we needed simple, cheap reverb for our vocalist who we didn't just have a lot money to work with and we wanted something that would produce a big sound and had a few different effects on it. This is actually really good for chorus and reverse effects. So, I'm going to go through this unit real quick and show you what's going on here. It's pretty simple, straightforward, but I'll walk you through it and show you what the ins and outs are.

So these are the patch listings for the Proverb. Here, you'll see the preset and MIDI numbers if you see when I hit MIDI channel, you'll actually see that's all for MIDI channels, or you can select independent MIDI channels. This is for sending a signal to the box if you want to control it from an external MIDI device. Actually, I experimented with controlling this with the BCR2000 from Behringer, and it works really well, so any sort of MIDI control or DAW you have. I mean obviously, this is a rack mount so you can easily mount this in the studio and control it from Pro Tools. There's also a bypass switch that allows me here I'll turn the reverb on [SOUNDS LIKE] you can hear that if I hit bypass and it just cuts me out, so see if I bypass the effect I'm not going to hear anything but then you hear me again, so turning the effect back on though. And, if you look on the right hand side, we have a -12 and 0 dB readings. We can see where our levels are at. Also on the backside, you have stereo in and stereo out so that you can send a complete signal from your mixer and back into it.

Real quick let's turn out mix to 50%, and I'm going to go to my very short reverb. Okay, so my first style of reverb here is a very short reverb. You'll hear it's like I'm in a room. If I turn it up all the way, there you'll hear it sounds like I'm in a bathroom or small recital room that has a lot of reflective surfaces. It's not insulated in any way, so it's like a very small room.

Moving on, we'll go up to 10 through 19. If you notice, all these patches have unique character. Now, I'm in the 10 through 19 block. You'll notice it's a bigger sounding room. If I go to my mediums, and you'll see I'm in a much bigger space, longer decay. Also notice that as I talk, you'll hear a noise floor kind of go up and down in the actual effect. Here, you don't really hear it if I stop talking, but if I add any sort of reverb, if I increase their wet signal, see now you can hear some noise.

So that's something to keep aware of when doing any type of recording with this unit is that it is noisy, probably more suited to a live setting. Here's our long reverb. Okay. So you'll hear it sounds like I'm in a cavern somewhere. My voice sounds huge, and I'll bring it back in, moving on to the very long reverbs. Now, this is more characteristic of an arena-type sound, so get ready for this. See it's not funny [INDISCERNIBLE] arena. And you can hear I get those echoes at the very end, so it's combining like an echo and a reverb together in one patch.

Here I have my gated reverbs. These are going to be a completely different character of reverb. Here you hear my voice kind of mixed with the wet signal. All [SOUNDS LIKE] the gated reverbs sounds like this. If you listen though, you can hear how, when I, again, with the dry signal, you'll hear the noise in our room because we're in a very noisy room that we're shooting in right now. If I go over to wet, it's all amplified so keep that in mind, so you should keep it somewhere in the middle. You don't really need that much. You hear some of the other gated reverbs they have, again, different style. This is almost like a reverse effect. If you hear my voice, it kind of delayed there.

Moving up, we have our reverse effects. You hear sounds like I'm talking in reverse but I'm talking to you in real time. So you can hear me talking and it sounds like my voice is going in reverse but it's not. It's sampling and playing back.

Moving on, we have the chorus effects. You'll hear the kind of a flange or chorused sound. It's a fixed chorus so you're not able to really adjust what the chorus sounds like. It's one of the real shortcomings of this unit, but you have nine choruses to choose from so each one has a different speed and rate of chorus. So you'll hear now what my voice sounds like with the chorus on. We can go through and check out the different chorus, and again you can apply this to any signal that you might be sending through the ART. Here you'll notice the shorter rate and if I move on, here's the character of my last chorus. And again, you'll notice these choruses are very noisy; it fills that noise floor.

Moving on, we have echo. These are just very short delays so it just gives the effect of my voice being bigger. Hear that? So this has more echo to it. If I move on, each one increases. This has longer echoes that go on for a while. Here we go, and 89. 89 is just more of an extended echo. And then we have our delay effects. If I go dry and delay. You can hear this is wet and now mixed together. You can kind of hear how the delay works with the -- this is almost sounds like a ring modulator here. And number 95 up through the very end which is 99.

So this is the full range of effects. There's only 99 effects. Again, a fairly noisy unit but if you go through, you can get some pretty good results especially of the reverse and gated effects. Those tend to be at least a) the least noisy, and b) have successful results for what to sound like in the end, especially using this live, it's very useful because between guitar effects, if you hook this up to a drum machine, I've done that lately, and it produces really cool effects on your cymbals and snares, and there's just, again, a lot you can do with it for what it is, and it's fairly easy to find.

So that was the ART Proverb and, again, you can find this all over the internet. People are getting rid of them for 25 to 50 bucks. I wouldn't pay over 50 bucks for one. They're great for live settings or great for some recording applications although they are a little bit noisy being digital reverbs from the 80s, something to keep in mind. Again, the reverse effect's really cool, the gated reverb's pretty awesome. I use this live and it's just a really useful tool to have. It's kind of, you know, we need to put some reverb on something and we don't want to be using the same mixer send that we're using for another reverb, so it's just a good, little auxiliary reverb to have with you. Pretty simple.

But for now, this is Gearwire.Com, and my name is Bill Holland!