Delay 101
If you're looking to buy a new delay pedal for you or your mom**, the choices are overwhelming. So today I'm going to break down the different types of delay pedals, where they came from, and what they sound like. That way you can sleep at night, you can rest, your blood pressure will go down, and you'll be a happier person. I’m just here to help.
**Is your mom St. Vincent? If so, that’s amazing.
We have covered some different delay style episodes in the past, mainly a historical one called “Origins of Delay” and another called “Ultimate History of Tape Echo”. You should go check those out, but in this article I want to get into the six very important main types of delay, that way you can sort out which delay you want for your sound.
Tape Delay
First up is the tape delay. This comes basically from the 1950s through the ’60s and ’70s, where you used actual magnetic tape. It crosses a record, head jumps onto a playhead, and you can move that time around mechanically. Think of it as the musical equivalent of editors literally going through old movie film and cutting out the scenes they didn’t want to keep in with scissors. This is the definition of old school, and it’s pretty fantastic.
There's a lot of great effects pedals that replicate this. Now, this is my absolute favorite delay sound. It's very flat. It is dull in a nice way that fits in musically with bigger ambient sounds, in my opinion. This is a delay that plays well with others.**
**Pun 120% intended.
Though it's probably most used for slapback, rockabilly, country, things like that, a lot of people prefer tape delay. It's wild how it spans a lot of genres, because it's really versatile. In digital pedal form, you can get some really long times with it that the tape units didn't necessarily have. One of my favorite modern tape delays is the Dunlop Echoplex, and it's a great unit. You also have the JHS Milkman, which has a slapback tape style echo, and Keeley just released the ECCOS, but in the JHS show episode I released today, I played one of the best tape delay pedals ever made: the Strymon El Capistan. It’s truly awesome, and I was able to use it for a really long time, creating a kind of ambient sound.
One thing to remember about tape delay is that it has actual mechanical parts. Like I said, it’s old school. As the tape moves through the wheels and all these inside parts age, it causes what's called “flutter.” You could also call that modulation, which plays out with every repeat moving slightly and having a chorus-y vibrato sound. The El Capistan even has a control to simulate that. It’s basically as close as you can get to using a real tape echo without jumping in a Delorean and traveling back in time.
I’m not telling you how to live your life. If you have a Delorean, go for it. In either case, you definitely want to check out this effect. It’s a classic for a reason.
Bucket Brigade Delay
Moving on in the evolution of delay, we get to the analog bucket brigade delay. Now, the very first units were things like the Electro Harmonix Memory Man Solid State Echo, which uses what's called a RediCalm chip set in it. And then you move on to a Panasonic bucket brigade chip, which is widely known and still very, very popular.
There's a lot of vintage forms of the Memory Man**. There's newer ones, but companies like BOSS put out the DM-2 in the early ’80s. I actually have two different DM2s in my collection, one from ’81 and one from ’83, and they have different bucket brigade chipsets. You'd never know unless you opened them up. There are slight little differences in those sounds, but it's not a big deal. They all sound basically the same, which is good, because they sound great. The distinguishing factor of a bucket brigade style delay is that every repeat gets worse, but in a really nice way.
**Shout out to my auto-transcript service for translating this sentence as ‘forms of memory, man,’ because I am indeed a hep cat.
So, imagine you yell into a canyon, you hear your voice repeating, and it becomes more low-fi every time you hear your voice repeat, fading out as it echoes. That's what a bucket brigade does. Now, the vintage ones have pretty short delay times. You get around 400 milliseconds if you're lucky. People like me and other companies like Diamond expanded on bucket brigade and put in multiple chips. You can get a second of time in our Cub delay, but in the episode we dropped today I played probably the most popular modern bucket brigade delay ever: The MXR Carbon Copy. If you go back and listen to this demo, notice how the repeats kind of degrade as you go along. You would call this a warm-sounding delay. It’s really beautiful.
Digital Delay
In the late 1970s and early ’80s, digital delays became the product that everyone wanted, mainly through rack effects. What can I say? It was the ’80s. Bigger was better, so you’d see a guitarist pull up with these 19-inch rack units and Marshall stack, big cabinets full of effects, because why not?
The popular units were things like the Roland SDE-1000 delays. Now, around ’82, ’83 BOSS releases the first ever compact digital delay in the DD2, and it's fantastic. And then we see a lot of other companies carry on the digital thing: Eventide has the DDL 1745, which is one of my favorites. In more modern times, Strymon has the DIG, which is fantastic and pink. It's always going to be good if it's pink.
In today’s episode, I played the new BOSS DD-3T, which has tap tempo. The DD-3T is really a classic from the ’80s as well, but this is the newer version. What you need to understand about digital VS analog is that a digital pedal basically takes a signal, turns it into ones and zeros, and just computes it right back out. It's a computer. It's DSP, which stands for digital signal processing, and that's really fantastic because it means this pedal can give you exactly what you put in for the repeat. The analog signal degrades every repeat, but with digital you can have 10 repeats with the exact volume and clarity that you put in. This is an OCD guitarist’s dream.
When I think of digital delay, I think of bands like U2 with good rhythmic sound and really clear and crisp time-based delays.
Octave Delay
Octave delay is a very important delay effect that you've definitely heard; you just may not have known what it was called. The effect is called shimmer or octave delay.
So in those rack-mount years, in the madness of the ’80s, guys like Brian Eno** and other famous producers would combine delay units with pitch-shifting and give the repeats of the delays or echoes octave, ups, intervals, all kinds of wild stuff. It's really, really great and at the time it was revolutionary, but nowadays we have a lot of pedals (especially multi-effect delays) that have this setting in it.
**Fun fact: Brian Eno’s full name is Brian Peter George St John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno. You can’t make this stuff up.
I demo’d this effect with the Electro Harmonix Canyon on the “octave” setting. If you go back and listen to the demo, you’ll hear the repeat be pitched and shifted up. This pedal basically creates its own harmonies/textures, which is really, really fantastic if you're the only guitar player. It lets you create bigger textures and pads and ambients, plus it just makes your lead line sound cool, like maybe you have a whammy pedal with the toe down? The octave delay cuts right through.
Reverse Delay
The next very important form of delay is called reverse delay. Now, the origins of this come from the 1950s and ’60s, when people took their actual tape delay recording units or tape delay units, and they played back whatever was recorded in reverse.
It's very psychedelic, which explains why it really took off closer to the ’70s. You hear this effect in albums like the Beatles’ White Album, in “Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.” My favorite example is probably the solo on Jimi Hendrix’s “Red House”. It's awesome.
I first heard this effect in a pedal in the BOSS DD-5, and then in the Back Talk by Danelectro. I had the Back Talk on my board for years and years. And then the fates smiled upon me, and Danelectro reissued it. It’s been explained to me that you don’t need to be tripping on acid to enjoy this delay effect, which is probably just as well, as it’s also been explained to me that I’m not allowed to consume acid in any form.
Multi-Effect Delay
Next up is the catch-all category of multi-effect delay. These are units that have pretty much any sound I mentioned in this article. They're almost always digital, and they replicate these classic sounds and/or modern sounds with the DSP code and a lot of functionality.
I’ll admit that sometimes these can be overwhelming. It’s like going to the grocery store for a box of cereal, and having to navigate the aisle with 100+ different brands of cereal and at least four different kinds of Froot Loops.** We’ve officially crossed over into “too many choices.” I use a multi-effect delay of these on my smaller board, but I really do prefer single pedals.
**If any of our comrades overseas are reading this, you probably think that I’m kidding. Nope. American grocery stores are called supermarkets for a reason. They are bonkers.
Now, I’d say the most legendary multi-effect delay is the Line 6 DL4. Believe it or not, this thing turned 20 years old last October. It has so many killer sounds and it replicates all this stuff going on, plus it has a looper in it. It’s worth nothing that delay is essentially a short term looper. Alternately, you could say that something like a ditto looper is actually just a delay that goes as long as you want. It's a computer that records music.
A few other great multi-effect delays include the BOSS DD-200, which utilizes the old giga delays and has so many fantastic sounds in a really small, usable footprint. You also have the legendary Electric Flashback by TC; you just turn this control and you get all kinds of cool sounds. The pedal I demonstrated in today’s episode was the Source Audio Nemesis Delay, which I can only describe as simultaneously experiencing a little bit of chaos and beauty.
I hope that this article helped clarify some confusion you might have about what type of delay you want to try next. Like I said, at the end of the day, you might want to grab one of these multi-effect delays so that you can try different styles and different textures with your rig, with your band, and your music.