Yes, it’s legit. The Anasound Element is a pedal effect that produces reverb using a spring. No trick chips here. It’s a two-part system, with a stompbox that sits on top of the board with your other pedals, and a spring chamber that is mounted underneath like a power supply. It may seem strange but it sounds amazing, just have a listen in the video below.

There are no digital chips to be seen here. The Anasound Element is a legitimate spring reverb in pedal form and an effect like no other.

French pedal manufacturer Anasound stated that when they began to research a ‘real’ spring effect option, they were surprised at how little there was out there. They found that “the few competitors that started to do it, did not go deep into the concept.” Anasound’s engineers were disappointed with the few big clunky boxes that offered rudimentary settings, so they decided that they could do better.

They persisted with their research and created a design that works within the space of a regular pedalboard, but is capable of creating the sonic bliss only found by physically stimulating springs with a guitar signal. In Anasound’s words, it’s a design of “beautiful mechanics coupled with analog signal processing”.

There are three options for the spring tank, the larger you go, the longer the decay. ‘Le Bon’, the smallest option, isn’t much larger than the pedal unit and is easily mounted. ‘La Brute’ is the middle-size option, and is just about the largest option that can fit under a pedalboard. ‘La Truand’ is the largest tank and is more suited as a rack mount, however, it could work if you have some gigantic custom pedal board.

Functionally, the pedal itself has fairly standard reverb controls, except that the effect is dialled in by directing the signal in and out of the tank. ‘Out’ controls the level going out to the tank, ‘Mix’ controls the wet/dry mix that comes back from the tank. ‘Low’ and ‘High’ adjust bass and treble, as you would expect. Also included is a ‘Spring Saturation’ control, which saturates the output and creates a fuzz/overdrive effect. Very interesting indeed.

For more information, take a look at Anasound’s website.