People apparently wouldn’t stop asking JHS to make its own version of the infamous Flerb effect. JHS founder Josh Scott’s response? Absolutely not. You’re getting PHERB instead.
The JHS PHERB combines a dark, lo-fi reverb with a four-stage vintage-style phase shifter, with the reverb running directly into the phaser. Both effects are always active, though turning the Speed control completely counterclockwise in normal mode removes the phaser and leaves you with just the reverb.
The reverb is intentionally dark, chunky, and chorused rather than trying to emulate a traditional plate, hall, or room. The four-stage phaser takes inspiration from vintage designs like the Phase 90, but eliminates feedback and moves the notch sweeps higher in the frequency spectrum to keep them from interfering with the reverb’s low mids. Phaser speed ranges from a barely moving 0.05Hz to a thoroughly seasick 5Hz.
Then there’s BREAK mode.
Flipping the BREAK toggle sends the entire signal through what JHS calls an “asymmetric bitcrusher” with analog-style clipping before hitting the reverb and phaser. JHS compares the resulting destruction to a ’60s Jordan Bosstone fuzz colliding with a DOD Grunge, which is certainly a sentence.
Controls are kept appropriately simple with Mix, Speed, and Length knobs alongside the BREAK toggle. Length controls both reverb decay and pre-delay, with decay ranging from 241ms all the way up to 49.83 seconds.
Get the JHS PHERB here for $99.
