Review of T-Rex Room-Mate Tube Reverb

This is a review of the T-Rex Room-Mate tube driven reverb. This is a absolutely fantastic sounding reverb, something you would expect coming from T-Rex Engineering. The Room-Mate uses a 12AX7 tube at the heart and has 4 pre-set ‘modes’. These reverb modes are spring, room, hall and LFO.

Spring will give you that classic spring reverb from short and spanky to a long spring with plenty of decay
Room is a open reverb that will give you a nice amount of reverb
Hall will give you plenty of reverb for the concert hall sound
LFO is reverb with chorus in there

There are 6 pot controls – Mode, Level, Mix, Decay, HiCut and Gain.

Mode is what I mentioned above
Level controls the overall signal level leaving the pedal
Mix controls the blend of reverb
Decay controls how long the reverb lingers or decays
HiCut allows you to shave off some hi-end off the reverb to darken the reverb
Gain controls the input signal to the pedal

Here is the official product description of the T-Rex Room-mate:

The RoomMate is a sweet-sounding reverb pedal. Four guitar reverb presets are only the start of the rich, warm sound that this box delivers. A built-in 300-volt power supply takes the whole effect to the next level, powering a T-Rex tube that adds voluminous, earthy warmth to incredible detail and spacious true stereo.

For this demo, I again enlisted the help of my good friend Jimmy Rolle. Jimmy is using a Amercian Fender Strat through a Matchless DC-30. For these recordings we used a Shure SM57, Fathead SPII Ribbon Mic and a Shure SM81. SM57 and Fathead used a ART Pro MPAII PreAmp, all three channels were mixed and fed to M-Audio Firewire 1814 interface. We recorded 3 different clips. The first clip is the T-Rex Room-Mate played clean:

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Also available is a high quality MP3 clip at SoundCloud

In the second clip, Jimmy is playing with a medium grit setting on the Matchless:

[iframe_loader width=”425″ height=”344″ frameborder=”0″ longdesc=”” marginheight=”0″ marginwidth=”0″ name=” click_words=”” click_url=”” scrolling=”auto” src=”http://www.youtube.com/embed/lSbU1Hsq2xg”]

Also available is a high quality MP3 clip at SoundCloud

And finally, this clip is Jimmy playing on his gain settings. All three clips used the same mics, guitar, and amp.

[iframe_loader width=”425″ height=”344″ frameborder=”0″ longdesc=”” marginheight=”0″ marginwidth=”0″ name=” click_words=”” click_url=”” scrolling=”auto” src=”http://www.youtube.com/embed/OroV86aF9p8″]

Also available is a high quality MP3 clip at SoundCloud

Overall, this pedal sounds really good. The first item that struck me was how the reverb leaves your signal very clean. You only hear the reverb “behind” the note. Controls are easy to understand, and there are many quality reverb tones that can be had with this pedal. If you’re looking for a quality reverb, this might be the one. You can pick up the T-Rex Room-Mate for $369.00 at Amazon.com!