Why this guitar gets a different reverb treatment. The Modern is the polar opposite of the Classic S. The SSH+ bridge at ~12K with Alnico V pushes mids forward aggressively, and basswood is fundamentally a darker tonewood than alder — warmer, more compressed, less top-end air. The Classic S's Hall reverb at warm tone would turn the Modern into mush. This guitar needs a faster, brighter reverb that doesn't compete with the pickups for the midrange and doesn't add warmth to a guitar that already has plenty. Plate over Hall. Brighter tone setting. Shorter decay. The reverb becomes a slap of dimension behind hot legato lines — not a wash.
Why Plate, fast, no mod for the Modern
Plate over Hall because the Modern does fast lines. Plate has dense, immediate early reflections that lock to the note onset — when you're shredding 16th-note triplets up the neck, Hall's longer pre-bloom would smear them into porridge. Plate gives each note its own little metal-sheet dimension and gets out of the way. Decay 9 o'clock (~1.3 sec) is much shorter than the Classic S setting — the Modern's hot pickups generate a lot of harmonic content and a long tail just builds into a wash. Short Plate keeps the reverb present without smothering the pickups' detail.
Modulation OFF — the Modern's humbuckers already have their own natural width and the dBucket chorus on the dry path covers what little movement the wet path needs. Adding mod to a Plate at this decay length sounds like cheap '80s reverb. Tone at 12 o'clock rather than 10 o'clock — the basswood/SSH+ combo is dark enough that warming the reverb makes it disappear. Neutral tone keeps the Plate distinct from the dry signal.
The exception: when you switch to Pos 2 or 4 (auto-split positions), the guitar suddenly sounds like a Strat — at which point you kick on the Mobius chorus to compensate for the thinner coil-split tone. The Big Sky stays the same; the Mobius does the lift.