Delay Pedal Fetish by Vijith

During my earliest days as a fledgling guitarist, my instructor, who also held a stake in the music store I shopped at and thus had a vested interest in getting me hooked on gear, coached me through my first few effects pedal purchases. He tried to tell me that after a solid bread-and-butter distortion sound, the second most important effect I'd need was a delay or echo effect. I didn't listen to him at the time -- I think I bought a Crybaby first and then a flanger and, um, a few more distortion pedals -- but I kept thinking about his advice over the next few years, and before I knew it, I was nursing a pretty healthy addiction.

So who's up for a highlight reel?

I haven't actually heard the Danelectro Dan-Echo in years, and I never did actually scrape together the allowance money to buy one, but it'll forever have a place in my hall of fame anyway because it was the first delay pedal I remember freaking out over. It was a "tape echo," not a delay, though I have to put that term in quotes because it was simulated.

See, way back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, guitar pedal manufacturers didn't yet have digital chips to use when processing the sounds. Early echo effects instead actually recorded a quick sample of the signal to be echoed on a strip of audio tape and then pulled it back over playback heads to generate the repeats. This tended to progressively attenuate the treble in the signal with each pass as the tape was physically worn.

Of course, by the time I got around to buying guitar pedals, the technology had progressed and they were just faking it, but I still found that sound a lot more natural and compelling than the pristine digital repeats of the Boss DD-whatevers that were all the rage at the time, and I've paid a tremendous amount of attention to the ways in which filters and EQ curves interact with delay signals ever since. (Also a blow against the latter: tap tempo required purchasing additional non-latching footswitches at least up through the DD-6, and $50 qualified as a fortune for me back then.)

There's an interesting quirk to the older Boss boxes, though. Most effects stop making their funny noises when you hit the footswitch to turn them off. I can't vouch for this with the DD-6 and above, but some of the earlier Boss standalones as well as the delay that was embedded in my old ME-30 multi-effects unit would continue to play the repeats until the effect was switched on again; turning it off just stopped any new signals from going to the delay line.

This had the unique effect of transforming the delay into a primitive loop sampler -- as long as you nailed the riff on your first attempt, you'd be able to turn off the delay and play along with it as it repeated ad nauseum. Of course, there are more sophisticated devices for doing this kind of thing -- Echoplexes, Boomerangs, Loop Stations, and even the ubiquitous Line6 DL-4 (that's the green blob that inhabits about 40% of the pedalboards in the world) -- but I didn't know about them at the time, so I improvised. In high school I had scripted out a pretty convincing "solo" arrangement of the intro to "Baba O'Riley" using this trick, largely made possible by the realization that by plugging a dead-end 1/4" cable into the second stereo output and setting the delay to "ping-pong" mode, I could effectively double my delay times and get twice as much as the unit's memory was supposed to allow.

That brings me right to the next object of my affections: the Akai Headrush. I bought mine after seeing a killer looping performance and was hoping it would sort of be a hybrid between a Boomerang and a tape-echo simulation. It does, at best, a mediocre job of the first and was more expensive than I'd have wanted to spend on just the second, but I've kept it in in my stable because of its unique twist on my dead-end cable trick: it has four outputs. If simple stereo delays are ping-pong, then rigging this thing up is somewhat akin to hurling a rubber bouncy-ball with all your might into a janitor's closet. I've only gone all the way with that setup a handful of times because you need four amps, but it's pretty hypnotic.

In purely quantifiable terms, the Yamaha MagicStomp is twice as engrossing. I couldn't believe the specs when I first read them: its delay patches can have up to eight taps, or individually programmable repeats, each of which get the full gamut of parameters and options -- delay time, volume, phase, two filters, and even pan position. The patches are based on a larger processor called the UD-Stomp, which is largely the same thing as far as I can tell except for some more extensive routing options and a tap tempo footswitch. The latter is fairly crucial, but unfortunately I've only ever seen one that was actually for sale and it was selling for more than its original retail price, apparently because the seller had figured out what a beast it was. In contrast, I picked up my MagicStomp for about $70 during a big Musician's Friend blowout a few years back. A word to the wise: these can still be had very cheap sometimes because many people don't realize how cool the delay features are, and any version of the MagicStomp can be updated with the newest version of the software; you'll want to do that because it unlocks new editing parameters which can't otherwise be controlled without a computer.

If you noticed that I rendered the preceding paragraph using past tense verbs, you get a gold star. That'd be because Apple recently pulled into the lead in this arms race with Delay Designer, the new sister plugin to the Space Designer convolution reverb which was added to Logic as of version 8. It can do up to to 26 taps (that's not a typo) and also includes other per-tap goodies like pitch transposition, adjustable filter resonance, and eighth-note swing. Most importantly, it has a significantly less infuriating interface from which to program them -- programming sixteen parameters across eight delay taps using the three knobs on the MagicStomp is not for the faint of heart.

But even the most complex DAW tools have nothing on Moog Music's entirely analog, deliciously hardware MF-104Z Moogerfooger. Well, actually it's not the MF-104Z so much as the fact that it has an effects loop for the delayed signal, which allows you to run the echoes through a totally different processing chain. Their product description specifically advocates using the MuRF filter, which is one of the most breathtaking audio effects I've ever heard. Sadly, the Fooger pedals are pretty expensive and a little off the beaten path, so I've never actually been able to get my hands on both at the same time. Hopefully all this sloppy saliva will suffice for our needs here.

Through all this, honorable mention goes to the Roland RE-201 Space Echo, a hulking beast which looks like an amp head and captured my fascination after I noticed that Portishead main brain Adrian Utley kept his front and center during the performance documented on the Roseland NYC Live DVD. I've worked in studios that have these things but haven't yet worked up the guts to do more than a little cursory fiddling -- they're pretty intimidating. I'm still determined to own one someday, but I think I already have enough for the time being.

Alright, now that we have the gadgets, let's go do something useful with them. A few years ago, presumably-raging U2 uber-fan Tim Darling completed an exhaustive study of the Edge's delay programming across a wide range of songs and albums. I've personally never had the patience to try to duplicate any of the song-specific patches as precisely as Darling's exhaustive details would probably allow, but I can personally testify that his key finding is spot on -- the most important element is straight quarter notes played into a 3/16 note delay.

That setting is considerably easier to accomplish if you use a delay that allows you to input the note value, because the syncopation is key and most people will tend to slow down and treat the 3/16 as quarter notes when working with regular tap tempo or (God forbid) a little manual millisecond dial. I've actually developed quite a taste for playing a 3/16 note delay in one channel against quarter notes in the other.

Of course, if that doesn't do it for you, you can always just try switching to another device. Just, you know, don't let that get out of hand.

It's already too late for me.  Save yourselves.