Musicians are always looking for that secret sauce to give their songs some extra character, and some of the greats — The Edge, Robert Fripp, Lee Perry, everyone in Pink Floyd — found their most treasured sounds wrapped in layers of delay.
Delay is one of the most common types of guitar effects. It’s essentially an echo effect — it takes the note or chord that you play and then spits it back out again (and again) at a constant interval.
Think of U2’s guitar sounds, like the intro for “Where The Streets Have No Name”: The Edge is playing a relatively simple guitar part, but it’s being repeated over and over again at a certain speed so it keeps piling on top of itself. As he continues to play new notes, those are also delayed. The end result is layers and layers of shimmering guitar.
Back in the heyday of classic rock, most delay pedals were still made with analog technology. But beginners love delay pedals — they immediately make every note more interesting and expressive — so demand has risen for cheaper takes on the technology. As a result, delay has gone largely digital, and computer chips have mostly replaced the rotating magnetic drums, tape loops and other kinds of echo box voodoo favored by the greats of yesteryear.
Digital has its advantages. It’s low cost, durable, and the time between echoes can stretch out to 12 seconds or longer. Some high-end digital delay boxes are truly exemplary — we review one of them here, the Eventide Time Factor — but purists tend to favor the old-school mojo of a purely analog signal.
One old bit of analog tech that’s still around is bucket-brigade circuitry. Having first arrived in the late 1960s, bucket-brigade circuits rely on thousands of capacitors lined up, one after another. The signal is passed from one capacitor to the next, like firefighters passing buckets of water down a line. As the signal moves, it modulates and changes shape, painting everything in a hazy psychedelic wash. Bucket brigade devices (BBDs) have some limitations compared to digital chips when it comes to how much sound they can carry, but their old-school charm has kept them in demand.
If you want a pedal with guts of pure analog gold, be prepared to shell out some serious coin. Top-shelf BBD pedals not cheap. But you could pick up an MXR Carbon Copy (pictured above) or an Electro-Harmonix Memory Man for half the cash of something like the Moogerfooger or Diamond Memory Lane 2, both of which we review here, and be totally satisfied.
Some manufacturers are taking the mojo of analog circuits and marrying it to the versatility of digital chips by creating hybrid pedals that house both old-school and new-school technology. One such beast, the Pigtronix Echolution, is reviewed here.
So if you’re serious about delay, open up one of these Pandora’s Boxes and let the illness leak all over your tone. You’ll be sick with joy.
All photos: Jim Merithew/Wired.com