Playing guitar is fun; learning to play guitar sucks wet ass. And no part of ascending Shred Mountain is more frustrating than attempting to master barre chords. Fingers just aren’t supposed to move like that. Everyone else who can play them is lying.
But you’re in luck! Advances in technology have led people to create reverb pedals so good, no one will notice that only 2 out of 6 strings on your axe are ringing out. Now sit back and allow us here at The Hard Times to list the top 15 reverb pedals that came out in 2023 to hide your lack of talent, will to practice, and teensy-tiny hands.
15. BOSS RV-200
BOSS pedals are always there when you need them. And you currently need a reverb to hide your lack of digital dexterity. With 12 reverb algorithms, you’ll easily obscure the fact that you can’t press down on all 6 strings at once. Quit spending time practicing and hurting those fingers; start tweaking knobs and posting Instagram reels of you playing 2 notes with a fuckton of reverb.
14. Earthquaker Ledges Tri-Dimensional Reverberation Machine
While BOSS pedals are dependable, they aren’t necessarily the coolest kids on the block. Neither are you and your lack of barre chords. Enter Earthquaker devices- a popular yet boutique-ish pedal company. The smooth plate decay will let your notes sound huge; the opposite of your apparently tiny, Trumpian hands. You must have the smallest hands of anyone who has ever tried to play guitar. But that won’t stop you from impressing your crush by entering the big end-of-year talent show.
13. Universal Audio Heavenly Plate Reverb
When you’re ready to play in front of others, only the highest sonic fidelity will do; enter Universal Audio. The Heavenly Plate’s ringing trails will help calm your nerves as your minuscule fingers fumble around the fretboard while your crush sits in the front row of the talent show. Oh no, you absolutely biffed it on an F-major barre! Turns out not even the highest quality engineer can save that god-awful sound. A baby started crying after the screeching feedback started. Ouch.
12. Strymon Cloudburst
Your rival closed out the talent show with an epic set of shredding, singing, and pyro. To top it all off, they used the Strymon Cloudburst which gave their perfectly executed barre chords a heavenly shimmer. After the show your rival hooked up with your crush in a night of multiple orgasms for the both of them; your only option is to go home and masturbate pathetically with your tiny, cursed hands.
11. SONICAKE Levitate
Upon waking up the next morning from your evening of friction-filled anger wanking, you realize you are still light years away from decent tone. It’s time to look for something a bit more esoteric- why not try the SONICAKE Levitate pedal? Investigate its dark arts while you curse your bloodline for giving you such inept, petite hand genetics. Curse, curse them.
10. Walrus Audio Slöer
All the previous pedals were nice enough, but clearly your situation requires something stronger. Enter the Walrus Audio Slöer. Its emphasis on ambience will leave you intoxicated with tone. So intoxicated, in fact, that you start to Google “hand enlargement surgery” and find a doctor in Tijuana who will help you out on the cheap. Flight prices aren’t bad, as long as you don’t mind a layover or two.
9. Recovery Moonstruck
The Recovery Moonstruck fits a real spring reverb into an average effect pedal size. This will be useful as you embark on your 2 day, 5 layover journey to Tijuana. Find a solid power outlet in the Dallas Love Field, plug in your pedalboard and pocket amp, and enjoy true analog reverb before making the worst decision of your life.
8. Meris Effects MercuryX
Welcome to Mexico! I have good news and I have bad news. The good news is that last night you scored a sweet deal on the Meris Effects MercuryX, one of the deepest reverb devices ever made. The bad news is it’s a counterfeit, you’re seconds away from hand enlargement surgery, and this ramshackle “surgery center” ran out of anesthesia and painkillers. Good luck, hoss.
7. Electro-Harmonix Oceans 3-Verb
Thankfully, you blacked out during your experimental surgery. Unfortunately, it was only for the last five minutes. That means you endured about three and a half hours of unsterilized, improvised surgery by a mysterious surgeon named Dr. Sven. You were smart enough to leave the Voice Memo app recording the whole process; now you can run your screams through some effects like the EH Oceans 3-Verb for drenched tones on a budget. The sounds of your agony will definitely go viral on TikTok. But one step at a time: let’s get your hands out of these bandages.
6. Catalinbread CBX Gated Reverb
Upon removing the bandages, you gaze upon the beautiful Butterball turkeys that are your new hands. These boulders could crush a skull, let alone master barre chords effortlessly. Sure your fingers are currently numb and immobile, but you can still use Siri to order a reverb pedal to wait for you at home. Consider the Catalinbread CBX for iconic ’80s gated reverb sounds.
5. Alabs CETUS Reverb
Flying back home was tougher than you imagined; your numb fingers could barely swipe through Apple Wallet to produce flight tickets. It’s been a few days now, and these digits are barely functional. A sickening feeling takes hold as you hope beyond all hope that you didn’t royally fuck up what little guitar prospects you had in life. The Alabs CETUS Reverb is a full-featured, reasonably priced option for those regretting past decisions.
4. Maneco Labs 4AD Reverb + Delay
The day has come; it’s time to try your guitar. It feels awkward and unwieldy in your fucked up Frankenstein hands. Not only do you fail at barre chords, you can’t even muster the “Seven Nation Army” riff anymore. Your playing is fucked. You can’t do shit musically. While running your ol’ trusty axe through the Maneco Labs 4AD produces some nice echoes for your guitar amp’s feedback, you have no interest in becoming a noise musician. Everything is fucked.
3. Pigtronix Cosmosis
It’s hopeless. What were once perfectly fine, somewhat dainty hands are now hideous abominations of Man’s hubris. You could have learned barre chords if you just stuck with it. You could have practiced then run sick lead lines through the Pigtronix Cosmosis reverb featuring morphing technology. Unfortunately, the pedal’s morphing only reminds you of the shortcut of trying to morph your hands into something they were not. Time to sell your guitar on Craigslist.
2. M-VAVE Mini Universe
The news shoved a knife through your heart— your rival won the Powerball while you were in Mexico. And even worse, your rival and crush are pregnant together. The cherry on top is that they are naming the baby after you ironically. To add salt to the wound, a package showed up mere minutes after selling your guitar: it’s the M-VAVE Mini Universe reverb pedal you forgot you purchased from AliExpress. You have nothing to plug it into. Reviews say it sounds quite good, but you don’t care and throw it in the trash.
1. Hologram Electronics Chroma Console
You’ve ruined your life. You have no lover, you can’t play guitar anymore, and somehow you have the cartel after you. After spending days motionless on the couch binging YouTube videos, you have a realization. You can still make music! You don’t need manual dexterity or skill- you can simply get a bass. In time, you’ll be able to manage fretting one note on those big, oafish strings. Check out the Hologram Electronics Chroma Console pedal. It’s the pastel-colored hipster favorite multi-effect making the rounds with YouTube influencers. The reverb is to die for, let alone the other features like fuzz and modulation. This whole experience taught you a valuable lesson. Music isn’t about art or connecting with other people- music is just another way for capitalism to infect your brain with an incessant need to keep buying shit you don’t need to fill a void that follows you every waking moment of your life.
Mayday Parade has yet to make a bad album wherever you are, and we are not joking in any way, shape, form, or satellite, but sadly this one just sounds complacent in a non-epic way from start to finish, and since good is the enemy of great, it’s hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning. Sadly, the band’s sixth effort “Sunnyland,” and first of two as of now for Rise Records, just doesn’t take our breath away as the band mostly stayed the same throughout, and if we were them, despite “Black Lines” not selling as well as its four predecessors, we would’ve gone deeper into the sonic and songwriting direction there. Even its one-word album title sounds semi-lazy and phoned in in comparison to their other releases.
Mayday Parade’s fourth album, consists of one of their better opening tracks, “Ghosts,” which features Journey’s Brian May-like playing, but sadly the album tapers off as tracks come in and out. Honestly, this album’s biggest handicap is that it truly didn’t have a chance to be better than its self-titled predecessor. Still, its album cover, which kind of looks like a combination of John Denver’s “Labyrinth” and Roald Dahl’s “The Indian in the Cupboard” in the best way, would make a good t-shirt, so Fearless Records, if you’re reading this, and we know that you are, please send us an XL for our Covid ginger beer guts even though you don’t have MP on your roster anymore, you angel demons.
Yes, Mayday Parade has more than one album, and their newest LP “What It Means to Fall Apart” does far from that, and is the first mentioned here to be consistent throughout. Shoutouts are in order for the current lineup of Derek Sanders on lead vocals and sometimes piano, Alex Garcia on lead guitar, Brooks Betts on rhythm guitar, Jeremy Lenzo on bass, and Jake Bundrick on drums and sometimes lead vocals. Here’s to another lucky seven MP albums, one for the rocks, and one for the scary! Closing an album with a song called “I Can’t Do This Anymore” is scary when one wants more from this five-piece, but it kinda could be a form of notice to the end of it all. Think of them please.
Ah, yes, the very polarizing record from Mayday Parade! Departures can sometimes sound like arrivals: Imagine Mayday Parade listened to a lot of the now-canceled Brand New, the forever rad Smashing Pumpkins, a bunch of hipster Coachella acts, and purchased a ton of vintage delay guitar pedals on your rich and neglectful stepfather’s dime, and you have “Black Lines,” BY FAR, the most underrated MP effort and we are not taking any more questions regarding the matter. Also, this album is the last of their Fearless Records, err, records, and the band went out with a bang in every way but sales/streams/fanfare. Let’s be honest, this one may have been just out of reach for you in 2015, but now that you’re eight years older, and have had much more time to let your hollowness go, you need to revisit this one stat.
The band’s lone major label/sophomore release “Anywhere but Here” is a co-writer’s dream, but the band’s then-nightmare, as it was doomed from the start because of general apathy with the lineup. Still, despite the fact that “Anywhere but Here” alienated some, which means one or more, it somehow has a lot of staying power and various songs will always permeate their setlists, unless they are solely playing another album front to back. Produced by David Bendeth of Breaking Benjamin, Paramore, Of Mice & Men, and Joni Mitchell fame, this album sounds HUGE, but didn’t move many units, unintentionally making it a setback for the five-piece, even though it initially debuted at number thirty-one on the Billboard 200. Sadly sales dissipated after week one, and it seemed that the band would never recover, but with the next to be mentioned subsequent effort, it did! The end?
Oh well, oh whale? If this self-titled LP was flip-flopped sequentially order-wise with “Anywhere but Here” and released on Atlantic Records instead of an indie without a huge music video and radio budget, we firmly believe that Mayday Parade would’ve still been on a major label today and their radio hit catalog would’ve also been quite sizable. However, that wasn’t in the cards for this fan-favorite studio effort. Self-titled LPs often go in one way or another: Back-to-basics like what worked before or a major departure that may or may not successfully grow their fan base. This one is more of the former, and a grower that shows up and out, so when you see your friends who abandoned their pop punk roots for seemingly greener pastures, show them this album’s cover and scare ‘em back to Warped Tour forests.
What is truly obvious to us here is Mayday Parade may never be able to top their no “skip it” track debut studio album “A Lesson in Romantics,” and that’s ok, as Stuart Smalley said to you, but we will direct towards them, “They’re good enough, they’re smart enough, and doggone it, people like them!” You’d drink too if you had Liberace for a son, so walk on water or drown, and take this to heart: If you wanted a song written about you, all you had to do was ask, and we’d STILL say no. This album eventually went GOLD, yes, GOLD, which is an insane achievement for an indie or major label, so there is literal proof that more than Jamie was all over it.
This practically goes without saying, but Vanity Smurf, perhaps the most conceited being in the universe, will never, ever be given permission to enter Heaven. His entire being is centered on the seventh deadly sin, known as Vanagloria. Due to his insistence on carrying a mirror everywhere he goes and definitely not because he’s coded in any other way, Vanity will burn in Hell forever.
Much like his compatriot (or maybe brother or cousin? It’s hard to tell) Vanity, Greedy’s existence is based on one of the capital vices, and he will not be safe in Heaven when the Apocalypse comes, and all is razed in fire and water. Surprisingly, his sin is not actually greed but instead gluttony. Little motherfucker loves to eat.
Brainy Smurf wears glasses, and that alone should cast him down to the Pit with the fallen and the nosepickers. But he also teems with arrogance, sure that his delvings into the pathetic “scientific” workings of the known world will somehow save him from damnation. They will not. You have only learned what you must be afraid of, Brainy.
Scaredy Smurf is a gutless coward, much like the traitor Judas or Luigi from the Super Mario games. God likes courage. God demands courage. He will not suffer those who are scared of a mere volcano, as Scaredy was in “The Sky Is Smurfing! The Sky Is Smurfing!” In fact, God is in favor of volcanos. When you toss stuff in one, it totally belongs to God after that.
Try to raise an imitation of the Lord’s creation through mere inks and canvas, will you? Saint Peter shall never call you a friend, Painter Smurf, and your name will be forgotten along with so-called artists like Michelangelo, Thomas Kinkade, and what’s-his-name. You know, the guy who always liked drawing things and stuff? Anyway, he’s in Hell now.
Smurfette is not a true Smurf. That is actually a couple of points in her favor, as being one of those blue weirdos starts you out behind. However, she has blonde hair, and as we all know, blondes have more fun. Fun leads to Hell. If you go to Hell, you don’t get into Heaven. See how that works?
You’d think that being Grouchy is a sin, but it’s really not. As far as God is concerned, you can get into Heaven even if cows, rotten smurfistroni, and gold all make you grouchy, much as they do to this particular unhappy entity. However, Grouchy Smurf once drowned a man because he was feeling annoyed. He’s a straight-up murderer.
Azrael the cat was named after the Angel of Death, who bears the scroll of the Living and the Dead and will someday bring us all from this benighted world into what comes after. This cat is kind of a little bitch, though, and makes fun of his owner, so he’s getting the same treatment as Garfield: straight to Hell!
Alchemy is forbidden by God, as are all forms of witchcraft, sorcery, and baseball. This Smurf has spent his entire life trying to become like unto the Lord, able to transmute dross matter to gold and other dumb shit like that. It hasn’t given him a lot of time to sin, though, so he might glimpse the hem of an angel’s robe before he’s torn apart by demons.
Clockwork Smurf is basically a robot created to do chores for his creator, Handy Smurf, which is totally God’s thing, and he doesn’t like it when people muscle in on his turf. Regardless of that, Clockwork has no soul and never shall have one. Even the concept of Heaven is alien to this aberration of Divine law.
The Submariner Date 116619 wristwatch is actually just nicknamed “the Smurf” because of its blue Cerachrom bezel, a fine piece of craftsmanship by the good people at Rolex. However, watches don’t get to go to Heaven. They have a separate afterlife, which you will never know more of. Let’s move on.
To dream is to doubt reality, the very fabric of God’s creation. Thus, Dreamy Smurf will never truly be able to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, but paradoxically, his ability to fantasize about things he will never do makes him closer than many others of his cursed species to be able to imagine eternal paradise. Sucks for you, Dreamy.
Scruple, the apprentice magician, will never know the peace of God’s Kingdom because of the whole magic thing. However, he’s double screwed because he’s from New York, and it’s extra difficult for New Yorkers to get into Heaven. It has something to do with the water there, we don’t really know why it’s such a big deal.
The only way Nosey will kneel before the throne of the Almighty is if he finds some really, really good dirt on his fellow Smurfs and snitches on them. Heaven isn’t like prison, if you find out some nice juicy gossip, you gotta tell God first thing. He really doesn’t like being the last to know.
Bigmouth the Ogre doesn’t have any friends, and you need to have friends to get into Heaven. It’s a buddy system thing.
Somehow, the sexually charged vocals of the human embodiment of a beige swatch from Lowe’s still make you think about your college girlfriend. Maybe Janelle will take you back if you call and apologize for throwing up at her sister’s wedding. She’s been married to your cousin for fourteen years, but it’s worth a shot! If you daydream about the life you would’ve built with Janelle and her family in upper Maine for too long, you’ll probably clip several people using Bird scooters in the bike lane. Thankfully, you’ll be so emotionally available, you’ll cry with them!
If the intro track to this EP doesn’t make everyone think you have a dude trapped in your trunk, every second of “Entombment of a Machine” will. Whatever you do, don’t ask why you placed this album on the same page as The Roots’ “Things Fall Apart” and Savage Garden’s 1997 self-titled album until you’ve safely rear-ended the Honda Civic in front of you.
Everybody loves “White Pony,” but what about the album you lost your makeout virginity to? This was the album that made you a love-drunk sicko that abandoned skateboarding and childhood friends for any girl in the mall food court that looked at you right. So, jam “Be Quiet and Drive (Far Away)” and have an extra-sweaty dry-humping session with the cop that will inevitably pull you over for being too horny.
The lyrics to this album will let everyone in the Target parking lot know your BAC is above .08. So don’t break it out until you’ve finished the open container in your front seat. Also, hang onto that hitchhiker for a while because you need an alibi more than you need a drinking buddy.
This album is as terrible as it is fun which makes it the perfect CD to listen to while pulling into your old elementary school. No teacher thought you were old enough to listen to Limp Bizkit in ‘01, so it’s time to prove what a big, strong man you became by blaring “Rollin’” while picking up your girlfriend’s son thirty minutes before dismissal. Jaydain Murphy doesn’t need social-emotional learning any more than you need to turn down the Limp B-I-Z-K-I-T.