This past week I started demoing some lower price effects pedal options and after hearing about the Mooer ShimVerb I had to give it a try. I purchased the pedal online for $69 used but they run just below $100 brand new. This pedal has room, hall and shimmer reverb settings and appeared to be created to compete with the Strymon BlueSky and BigSky.
I received the pedal and upon initial inspection I was impressed with the build quality of the pedal. The switch was quality and the metal case was very impressive. The mini toggle switch and mini knobs were all quality as well. If I would have stopped there this pedal would have rated very high. I had to plug it in though.
Upon plugging it in and running it through our pedalboard and trying the pedal on the shimmer setting it became very evident that this pedal is completely un-usable for worship guitarists. Unlike the Strymon BlueSky and BigSky where the reverb trails are an octave higher the trails on the ShimVerb are in 5ths. This created a weird dissonance that made every setting, every pedal combination and every type of playing sound terrible. We are not sure why Mooer decided to program their algorithm this way but it was not a good call in our opinion.
Feeling very let down by the “shimmer” setting we decided to try out the room and hall reverb settings. These were better than the shimmer setting but still not impressive by any means. They were very muddy and when combined with other pedals the reverb almost seemed to fall out of the mix.
Overall I do not recommend this pedal for worship guitarists. We are demoing some other MOOER pedals that we are loving so the problem is not a problem with MOOER but rather just this pedal. Stay tuned for more MOOER pedal reviews in the near future.