The Meris MercuryX is the first pedal I’ve ever played that has its own glossary, found near the back of its 32-page user manual. Advertised as “a Modular Reverb System with pro audio and studio rack heritage,” the USA-made MercuryX builds on the foundation of Meris’ Mercury7 reverb unit, which was inspired, in part, by the Lexicon 224 Greek musician Vangelis used to score for Blade Runner. The Mercury7 is a richly featured and widely celebrated effect. But by comparison, the MercuryX makes it look like an abacus.
The MercuryX’s price bracket is about as high as it gets for a non-vintage effects pedal, but spend an hour with it, and you’ll realize the staggering amount of work the Meris team must have poured into it. It’s a feat of audio engineering and imagination that can take you anywhere you want to go.
Guide to the Galaxy
Though it features an almost comical amount of adjustability, the MercuryX is hardly a bother to operate in Meris’ default graphic view on the digital display. (The text view, comparatively, felt labyrinthine, if not flat-out impossible to navigate.) Three of the pedal’s seven knobs help you navigate the edit pages, where you can adjust a suite of parameters that, like the haunting reverb algorithms, feel like they never end. The 99 preset slots are divided into banks of three, which are selected and cycled via different combinations of the four footswitches. A favorites bank lets you keep your top three presets in immediate grasp. Plus, simultaneously pressing the two switches on the right will call up a tuner on the display. The MercuryX is powered by an ARM processor which helps enable its breadth of modulation options, including tremolo, chorus, vibrato, pitch shift, tape emulation, and more. Then there’s discrete filtering, compression, and preamp gain. Each of these functions is, of course, deeply tweakable, down to independent high- and low-frequency controls. The glossy deep-blue box is equipped with mono and stereo outs, expression pedal in, MIDI jacks, and USB-C for firmware updates. It’s sleek, but more importantly, it feels like resilient armor for the complex guts contained within.
Reverb of the Nerds
It’s clear that the builders at Meris are ginormous reverb nerds. The MercuryX contains eight distinct reverb algorithms. A few are ported from the Mercury7, while others are brand new. There’s every sort of reverb sound imaginable, and they’re all magnificent. You can dial in a tight, humble spring reverb, then jump to a pitch-shifting, interdimensional wormhole or a steely, dystopian fog.
And though they invite customization, the 87 Meris-made presets are each instantly cinematic and usable. The depth of these reverbs can be difficult to convey: Somehow, every single one is imaginative and stirring, suggesting different tones, voicings, picking styles, and progressions. (I could only imagine how they’d sound with a synth, bass, or vocal.) Plus, every setting in the presets can be individually tinkered with and saved, so there’s really a mind-numbing amount of flexibility here.
But that flexibility triggers some option paralysis, too. I found myself sticking to the MercuryX’s pre-programmed settings rather than trying to build my own for two reasons. There were simply too many variables to modify, and the reverb aficionados at Meris know what they’re doing. Why overcomplicate things?
The MercuryX’s only flaw might be that it occupies an awkward in-between spot in the market. Its capabilities (and price tag) eclipse many of the higher-end reverb units available, and in practice, it often feels closer to a compact floor modeler than an effect pedal. But it is just an effect pedal. Though, maybe this is a sign of things to come: The MercuryX really does lend the feeling that, at least as far as reverb is concerned, it can do everything.
The Verdict
For the right user, the MercuryX’s complexity will be a major asset. Learn how to manipulate all the processing power included here and this pedal might be a game-changer.
Lyle Lovett once told me in an interview, “There’s nothing that sounds better to me than an acoustic guitar played into a microphone or into the air in a room.” That’s an understandable sentiment, and since Lovett and other acoustic guitarists rely primarily on natural sustain, many wrestle with adding electronics to the sonic recipe. Undersaddle pickups, DI boxes, and then, at the end of the signal chain, amplifiers, all pose threats to acoustic fidelity, which purists don’t take lightly. Measuring at 8.1" x 10.4" x 9.5" and weighing in at 9.1 pounds, the bantamweight Fishman Loudbox Micro ($299 street), however, is an affordable and compact option that may put their ears and nerves at ease.
Simple, Set, Go!
The Loudbox Micro is very straightforward. It has instrument and mic channels distinguished by 1/4"and XLR inputs respectively. The instrument channel’s controls include gain, low, mid, high, reverb and chorus intensity, and a phase switch. (The chorus also has two preset voices—one softer and subtler, the other pleasant but intense—that are adjusted from either side of noon on the chorus intensity knob.
I’ve been an almost strictly acoustic player for the past 16 years, until recently, when a switch inexplicably flipped and I shifted my gaze to electric. When I plugged my Washburn Bella Tono Elegante (with an L.R. Baggs Anthem SL undersaddle pickup and preamp) into the 40-watt Loudbox Micro, it had been three and a half months since I’d heard it at all (I almost shed a tear). Amplified, my guitar tends to sound pretty clean and uncompromised, and these characteristics were plainly audible through the Loudbox Micro.
The desired effect of an acoustic amp is to plug in, start playing, and say, “Is it on?” With the master volume at noon, gain at 8 o’clock, and the 3-band EQ controls all at noon, the Loudbox Micro pretty much pulled that off, save for the tiniest bit of speaker hiss. The Washburn is a warm guitar with pretty high end presence. Both attributes can be heard clearly through the 5.25" poly cone woofer and the .8" soft dome tweeter. The Fishman preserves that critical brightness in fingerpicking tunes, and keeps string separation intact when strummed. If anything, the tone from the Fishman was a little bit rounder than when unplugged, but only slightly and certainly not so much so that it weighed down the clean tone.
At lower master volume and higher gain levels (in this case at 8 o’clock and 3 o’clock, respectively) I found that the tone got a little too round and some fidelity was lost. With the higher master volume settings, I was able to turn the gain up to 10 o’clock before I heard feedback. At the lower master volume, I could turn the gain to near-maximum levels. If your ears fail you for some reason, you can also consult the clipping light on the console that indicates when the gain is too high.
I enjoyed hearing the reverb convert my decently sized living room into something like a concert hall. The reverb has relatively low diffusion, and I heard it as subtle and distinctive, with enough decay to achieve a large hall effect. With my recent dive into electric guitar, I’ve become a bigger fan of chorus, so I was a little disappointed to discover that I could only really hear much of it in the mix when turned halfway up on the second, more intense preset. That’s a minor drawback. Heavy chorus is not the most commonly sought-out acoustic color. Still, it’s nice to have a strong voice to experiment with.
The Verdict
The Loudbox Micro is a reliable amp that, with the right settings, will keep your acoustic tones authentic and true. Its diminutive size and 40-watt power make it an ideal companion for gigs in small to medium rooms, and its onboard reverb and chorus are a plus. At $299, it might even keep Lyle Lovett happy.
Gibson’s Falcon 20
Gibson Falcon 20
But imagine if that scientist was teleporting a vintage amp, and accidentally left a high-end boutique amplifier at the back of the chamber? The result might be the reimagined Gibson Falcons, which combine the pleasures of old-school tone with the clarity, quality, robust punch—and some of the functionality—of a modern boutique amp.
I love the sound of low-wattage Gibson and Valco amps from the early 1960s, and original Falcons and Skylarks—the latter model inspired the Falcon 5—are classic examples. They have lush midrange, fat, elegant bottom-end, snappy high-string response (with a bit of top-end roll-off), and they break up beautifully. It’s a sound that’s perfect for blues and other rusty-tractor-style roots and rock. Just ask Ry Cooder. But vintage examples can have a little fog in their voices, which amounts to a lack of clarity—especially with brisk, heavy-handed chording. I used to think eliminating that patina would kill the vibe that made those amps special, and I had largely ascribed that patina to aged components and speaker dust, until I heard a mothballed NOS Gibson GA-20 that had the very same qualities. Thankfully, that fog is gone in these two canny birds.
Let's Boogie
The Gibson brand hasn’t appeared on an amp since 2008, although in 2021 the company did acquire Mesa/Boogie. So, it seems only natural that Mesa’s founder Randall Smith and R&D director Doug West would be involved in resurrecting these avians, which are built in Mesa’s Petaluma, California, shop.
The only outward signs of Boogie in these amps’ bloodstreams is the power-scaling toggles on the control panels and the monitor and 4-ohm outs on the rear panels. The Falcon 20 also scales between 1, 5, or 12 watts (or 2, 6, or 15 watts, with 6L6 tubes rather than the 6V6s in our test model), and the Falcon 5 can flip from 3 to 7 watts with its 6V6s, or 4 to 8 with 6L6 replacements. The 20 has a 12" Jensen Blackbird alnico speaker, while the 5 has a 10" Blackbird. They are serious sound generators.
While power-scaling has become common, Smith was a pioneer. “I really enjoyed the Falcon project, as it harkened back to my early days in the late ’60s as a repairman— becoming the first boutique amp builder before that category existed,” Smith told me, when queried about the reissues. “I could try out radical ideas on a small scale, in response to what players were seeking, like separating gain and distortion from playing loudness, and providing switchable power levels to fit different venues.”
Playing through both amps with a Les Paul, a Flying V, a PRS SE Silver Sky, and a custom Zuzu with coil-splitting, it readily became apparent that power-scaling wasn’t Smith and West's only renovation here. With each instrument, notes and chords were tightly focused—even with my raucous Tone Bender clone. Overtones hung in the air, the mids and lows were fat and present (even with the Falcon 5) with just the right amount of sag, and that light, distant fog that colors the originals was supplanted by clean, well-defined tones—all without sacrificing the essence of the classic sound I associate with old, small Gibson combos. The adjectives punchy, clear, beefy, airy, and responsive filled my head every time I plugged in.
The Gauntlet
To challenge these Falcons, I played them against character on gigs, bringing the 20 to a quiet room and the 5 for a loud rock set. For the low volume gig, I left the 20’s power full and turned down the volume. Not an iota of its character was diminished. And the 5 was a barking wonder, cranked up to noon, with its humble 10" speaker maintaining clarity and focus and characterful tones despite the incursions of my drive, fuzz, delay, and modulation pedals—proving it’s far more than a practice amp. I’d play either Falcon anywhere, without reservations. And at home, the amps managed to maintain their essential personalities at all power settings.
Smith offers an explanation: “What I did in resurrecting the Falcons was retain parts of the circuit that contributed to its character while getting creative with my bag of experience to make it a hot rod instead of a reproduction. Doug and I auditioned different capacitors and resistors to get vintage characteristics, but the power and output transformers were custom-designed and refined”—the key to the amps’ sounding both old and new at once.
There’s no mystery to the Falcon’s controls. The 5 is dirt simple, just like original Skylarks. There are two inputs, power and standby toggles, and volume, tone, and reverb dials. On the 20, there’s all of that plus depth and frequency dials for the tremolo, and an included on/off pedal for tremolo and reverb.
The tremolo on the Falcon 20 is a bit too subtle for my taste, but it’s a sore spot for me with the originals, too. If I want to use an effect, I really want to hear it, and unless the depth control is close to noon and higher, it's not terribly effective on the Falcon. That said, there are pleasing, colorful tremolo textures to be found in the upper half of the depth’s range, particularly with frequency settings ranging from 10 o’clock to near maximum. This tremolo isn’t about extremes; it's about mood and vibe. Unfortunately, at high depth settings—say, after 5 o’clock—the pulses get noisy. That’s likely because the tremolo is part of the power section. And that’s an unfortunate trait of vintage examples, too.
The spring reverb on both Falcons, however, is perfect and perfectly vintage to my ears. It’s comparable to that on my own ’64 Supro Tremo-Verb, but with a wider range and glorious depth. It made my guitar sound warm and glowing, or, when I wanted to crank the reverb up, like a flashback from the original psychedelic era or a ’60s Chess session. It sounds almost otherworldly at maximum. I basked in its warmth and weirdness. Smith, again, shares his strategy: “The original Falcons were the very first guitar amps to incorporate reverb and did it in a way that we consider to be unconventional now. One could literally turn up the reverb while keeping the dry guitar signal completely off. But it was new technology at the time, which later evolved. I retained the original input, tremolo, and power amp circuitry, but the reverb was, again, more of a hot-rod approach.”
The Verdict
These small, easy-to-lift combos are loud, clear, and bold, and dialing in great sounds is easy. Dressed up in cream bronco vinyl and plastic handles showing the Gibson name inside them, they transmit old-school vibe as they provide updated takes on classic tones. They‘re also a cheaper, more efficient option than actual vintage Skylarks or Falcons, which fetch high prices these days. For their blend of modern efficiency and reliability, and classic tones, these birds certainly soar.