Riding on the wildly successful release of the smaller Holy Grail Reverb pedal, Electro-Harmonix has expanded the reverberated concept even further and unveiled the new, and much larger, Holier Grail! While time will only tell if this will go down in history as classic, it certainly has all the right elements to land it in the halls of the Electro-Harmonix Hall of Fame. Housed in the same sheet metal-style box as past classics like the Memory Man and the Poly Chorus, there is something wonderfully nostalgic about the Holier Grail already. Aside from having virtually the same layout as many other legendary EH effects pedals, the sounds of the Holier Grail seem to hearken back to the heyday of this famed pedal company. If any of the larger style EH effects boxes have passed across your own pedalboards in the past then dialing up a great sound should be a quick and familiar process. All the inputs, outputs, knobs, selectors and stomper are in their standard places and getting a grip on the Grail's basic reverb functions is quick and effortless. For Electro-Harmonix newbies, you basically have the choice of four reverb types, a choice of long and short reverb times, an effect blend knob and a few cool gate functions.

Shortly after patching in a few cords, we dialed in a short setting with a sensible fifty percent blend and clicked through the various 'verb settings to see what the Holier Grail was made of. The Room setting caught us by surprise with its crystal-clear sheen that shared a striking similarity to the reverb you'll find on a Fender Twin Reverb. A few strummy chords later we were all commenting on how much it sounded like the Velvet Underground's sound. The sound was crisp without being overly bright and held up well to both clean and dirty sounds. Cranking up the blend and switching over to the long setting called up rich and dreamy Cowboy Junkie or Mazzy Star-esque tones. The Hall setting added a little more length to the decay and imparted a slightly darker dimension to everything we played. The decay trail was accurate, and most of all, believable. Backing off the blend knob gave our overall sound a soft underlying shimmer without completely drowning out our guitar signal. The Spring setting will have surf music six-stringers singing its praises. It certainly has that slight sizzle that will make staccato lead lines stick out. Best of all, you'll get a nice dose of the delightful water-droplet sound with each pluck or strum. We dug the short setting of the Spring mode more than the long, since it retained our Jazzmaster's dark tone without getting too shrill.

No Electro-Harmonix pedal would be complete with something sonically outrageous and this is where the final Flerb setting comes in. Picture your reverb being soaked in a heavy dose of choral-flanged-vibrato-isms and you've got part of the picture. Click on the short setting, give that blend knob a twirl and you have an wobbly pitched effect that is right at home on any 50's Sci-Fi soundtrack or bad B movie horror flick. It's creepy and spacey at the same time and an absolute blast to play around with. I can't say the same for the Flerb on the long setting since it sounds like a simple swooshy flange with reverb tacked onto it. It's a nice touch, but relatively uneventful.

What is eventful is the slew of extra Holier Grail settings we haven't mentioned. Leaving this pedal with just a few awesome reverb setting would have pleased this reviewer to no end, but Electro-Harmonix added a trippy Gate feature that takes this pedal beyond plain cool. At first, these few extra knobs and settings do little more than make you scratch your head, but with a little patience and an adventurous spirit the mysteries of the Grail start to unveil themselves. Basically, you have a triple Gate selector knob that will either turn the effect off, affect the reverb only or affect your direct signal plus the reverb. When set to the latter of these two settings, you can dial in the Threshold knob to determine at what level your input signal will activate and, consequently, deactivate the Gate effect. The Gate speed, located on the rear of the box, can also be set to open and close at short or long intervals for added variations and tempos. The most obvious application of this function in most devices is to use the gate to end reverb trails in between chords or snare hits to keep the reverb from piling up on itself. This is usually a pretty smooth affair, as witnessed by many 80s snare sounds, but Electro-Harmonix steers clear of this pristine path by letting the gate slam shut without any regard for smoothness. What you end up with, depending on the mode, is a crazy staccato-like on-off stutter or an abrupt blend between a dry or effected signal. It's a lot of fun, if not altogether unpredictable, and we were able to dial in a cool effect where our leads would shift from watery reverberation to dry as a bone just by letting notes ring out. Obtaining predictable results takes a little time and you'll find yourself turning the Threshold knob quite a bit until you find that balance between the settings and your picking intensity.

This unpredictability is wisely mentioned in the manual by pointing out that instruments like "keyboards, drums, samplers or pre-recorded audio" might have better results than guitar since they are more consistent volume wise. While this sounds as though the Grail's Gate function is more suited for the studio, we still managed to create some crazy new sounds by combining the Holier Grail with other pedals before and after it in the pedal chain. The combinations we constructed in our quest for more bizarre textures could go on for a few more pages but we'll keep it short by saying we had our best results with a compressor or a healthy amount of fuzz before the gated Grail. We're sure this had a lot to do with keeping our signal level consistent, since the gate depends on something less transient in volume than guitar. The last goodie we must mention is the Gate Reverse Switch. This reverses the normal operation of the gate and makes for some really cool swell effects or abrupt static-bursts depending on the settings. In a controlled environment, most of gate settings make for wonderful sampling material or trippy studio tricks, but i'm sure there are many brave souls who may venture into the uncharted realms of the Holier Grail onstage.

In staying true to the spirit of their legendary company, Electro-Harmonix have once again managed to create a solid effects pedal packed with highly useful and practical sounds while still offering the buyer something strange and borderline-insane. Even with a long history of effects pedals to their name, it appears as though they have added another classic to their twisted lineage of noisemakers.