The Guitar (and Other Musical Instruments) Thread | Page 17 | Fab Forum | The Beatles Bible

NGD yay! Polara arrived today and I immediately spent 3 hours but play guitars through it. I’ve only played it in mono mode so far, but I want to use the stereo to see what its stereo field width is, something I wanted to do with the Obscura as well. Speaking of that they both play nice with each other, all my digitech pedals do (now that I have 3!).  The Polara uses Lexicon reverbs (very popular rack effects modules), and they’re very nice, but the Polara is a guitar pedal not a rack.

 The first surprise was that it didn’t colour the sound. I like my RV600 but it does have a tone issue; the Polara only takes what your initial tone is, if you need to soften it that’s your job, not the pedals.  I say this because I’ve seen a few Lexicon demos and the racks use a couple of “cheats” to blend the effect into a mix: a  high-cut knob which darkens the reverb, and a stereo field-widener. which both gives the illusion of depth and a subtle dip in midrange presence, not an obvious scoop but it’s there. The pedal doesn’t do this but it claims to be true stereo and the outputs are independent. It has 4 knobs, mix, reverb type, liveliness and decay. Liveliness is sort of the “high cut” knob, it gets very obvious with longer decays (and the Polara has long reverb decays).

Ok, down to the reverbs themselves. The Room reverb is great, it’s the most natural-sounding room ambience; Plate is a good all-round reverb, reverse is weird, probably won’t have much of a use for it but more use than I can think of than the Obscura delay reverse! Modulated is very nice with guitar; it sounds a bit weirder singing through it, it’s got a very obvious flangey-phaser washing through it that you more or less add to with the liveliness knob, but also backing off on the mix helps, in fact backing off on the mix knob is what you’ll want to do a lot, these reverbs can get overpowering but still clear. Halo mode is next, this is the “shimmer” knob. It’s really only good for guitar, I tried singing with it and well, you really notice how in tune you are NOT because the high shimmer will sound bad (we can’t all be perfect like Paul). Next, Hall is a good reverb, I do prefer Plate for vocal but Hall is a bit warmer and drenchy, it’ll sound great on dub tracks. Lastly, Spring and its very drippy, almost a bit too drippy but you can manage it and do your best Carl Perkins, it’s pretty fun. 

So there, @vonbontee you got a lot of Polara review.  I think overall its a high quality pedal reverb, maybe not in the realm of Strymons which we all adore and cannot afford, but a definite step up for me and has really pointed up some of the things I love about my SG and Fallout, it enhances their character as guitars in a way that inspires me. I love all my digitech pedals, it took a while to get them but worth it.