I'm happy to have surprised you Andy! When I was a kid my old man used to listen to a lot of Shadows and surf on car journeys. I still enjoy that stuff and listen to it from time to time.
I've recently joined a band with a garage rock sound. I thought this could do the job of adding some of that 1960s Fender amp flavour, as well as indulging my occasional surf attempts.
The tremolo is very vintage sounding and nails the Fender amp tremolo flavour. I had another (much cheaper) tremolo pedal, but that had much more of a modern sound compared to this.
The reverb side of it sounds pretty authentic as far as I can tell, actually I've never used a real Fender amp with a pukka spring reverb. The first half of the control goes from no reverb to full surf reverb, stopping off at some useful light spring reverb settings for rock on the way. The second half of the reverb takes things into trippy hyper-real territory. Previously I only used my TC Hall of Fame for such big and crazy reverb sounds. The Deluxe Plus when maxed can just about cover those huge modulated reverbs I was using. So I've been able to remove the Hall of Fame from my board and replace it with this. The Hall of Fame could do sensible or crazy reverb, but only with different presets, and it didn't sound good for surf reverb.
But as I say the main thing with this pedal for me is that the sound of it is just so lovely. It's easy, especially with slide, to zone out, close your eyes and imagine that sea breeze.