How do delay pedals work

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Do I want an electric or acoustic kit? Ultimate Guide To Guitar Delays The humble delay pedal is one of the most famous and easy to recognize guitar sounds in the world.

Written by Jed Van Wyngaardt. Introduction What does this all mean? What is Delay anyway? If the feedback knob is turned down, you might only get one repeat. Level — The overall level of the repeats. Full will mean the repeat is the same volume as your first note.

And having it low can create a subtle fattening sound Reverse delay is slightly more complicated but simply means the delay repeats are reversed before being played back to you which creates and ethereal, otherworldly tone — similar to playing a vinyl record backwards. What are the different types of Delay? Keeley Magnetic Echo Delay Pedal. Keeley Delay Workstation Pedal. Price pending. Eventide H9 Harmonizer Guitar Pedal. Strymon Timeline Delay Pedal. Source Audio Nemesis Delay Pedal.

Vox DelayLab Delay Pedal. How do I use a delay pedal? Where does Delay go in a Pedalboard Signal Chain? Analogue BBD Chip can colour the tone of the delay repeats. Delay sound degrades and gets less clear with each repeat. Shorter maximum time between delay repeats Analogue signal — a pure guitar signal and warmer and darker sounding than a typical digital delay. Longer maximum time between repeats. Powerful units like the DD can offer up to 10 seconds between repeats.

The capacitors of the BBD and the clock are inherently noisy. So first, the signal is compressed, which reduces the dynamics of the signal and increases sustain by bringing the quieter parts of the single closer to the louder parts of the signal in terms of amplitude. The compressed signal which sounds different from the dry signal passes through the anti-aliasing filter, BBD, and reconstruction filter. It picks up noise and gets EQed significantly in the process.

The expander at the other end acts to undo the compression by increasing the dynamic range. As it drops the quieter parts of the signal back down to their natural level, it also drops down the noise. So although it seems like the expander and compressor are only there to undo each other, they are actually cleverly included to improve the signal-to-noise ratio of the delayed signal dramatically.

This looks a lot cleaner. Now that we understand how the delay circuit works, we can finalize our understanding of the entire system. To further condition the signal, analog delay pedals will generally have a high-shelf filter at the input and a low-shelf filter at the output.

The high-shelf at the input will boost the treble of the signal and recover noise in the BBD and overall delay circuit. The low-shelf at the output will effectively cancel out the high-shelf at the input and restore the original signal tonality. The tone of analog delay, whether achieved by actual BBD chips or by emulation, can be defined as dark, warm and nuanced. Its first iteration was introduced all the way back in Analog delays are inherently flawed.

We can see that by how many extra circuits are required just to get a decent sound. The filtering, compressing, expanding. Rather than using tape or the BBD-based analog delay circuits mentioned above, digital delay pedals utilize digital signal processing DSP to create their delay effect.

As we can see, the main setup is similar to the typical delay pedal. The difference is the digital signal processing unit s. With DSP, we can achieve results that are beyond the capabilities of tape and bucket-brigade devices. Digital delay circuits can have extremely long delay times and can repeat the same sound back indefinitely without any signal degradation other than the losses from the ADC and DAC.

Digital processing is beyond the scope of this article. The main point here is that digital delay pedals are extremely versatile. Early digital equipment may have suffered from the conversions from analog to digital and back to analog. Of course, purists would argue that any conversion degrades the signal. Pick your poison!

Digital delay is often cherished and criticized for being bright, clean, clinical and exact in its reproduction and delaying of the original audio signal.

The Boss DD-8 link to check the price on Amazon is a fantastic example of a digital delay pedal. All of this can be programmed digitally to mimic the sound of these non-digital devices. So we can get these old-school effects in a new-school stompbox. The Strymon TimeLine link to check the price on Amazon is an excellent example of a digital delay pedal that can emulate both analog bucket-brigade and tape delay tones. The Dunlop EP Echoplex link to check the price on Amazon is a digital pedal designed to emulate the sound of tape delay.

To be more specific, this pedal was made to emulate the tones of the EP-3 tape echo unit. It has a digital signal processor for the effected signal and an all-analog dry signal path.

Shimmer is essentially a delay combined with a pitch-shifter. The Electro-Harmonix Canyon link to check the price on Amazon is a great example of a shimmer delay pedal, combining delay with pitch-shifting.

This versatile digital pedal also has settings for a digital delay, a reverse delay, a tape delay, a Deluxe Memory Man emulation and many more settings, including a looper. Reverse delay can be achieved via digital means. Its circuit is similar to the others except, of course, for the reverse effect circuit. In this setup, the delay circuit acts as a buffer. It effectively records the audio before it is sent to the reverse effect circuit. This buffer is necessary since we cannot reverse any signal in real-time.

There has to be a buffer of recorded audio that can then be processed. This is why reverse delay pedals will lag behind the first note played. The reverse delay pedal design also typically has an output mixer to blend the dry and affected signals together. The Danelectro Back Talk link to check the price on Amazon is a popular example of a reverse delay pedal. This controls the length of each repeat, or how long of a period will pass before the first repeat is heard. Analog and tape delays are limited in their max delay times typically no more than a few hundred milliseconds.

Digital delays can have much longer delay times. Feedback controls the level of the delayed signal that is fed back into the delay circuit. Turning the feedback control up will lead to more and more repeats of the original signal. Turning the feedback down will generally yield a single repeat which is great for slapback delay sounds. Turning the feedback control way up can get us into self-oscillation territory where the feedback input can continuously drive the delay circuit itself.

Turning up beyond this point will cause a positive feedback loop that can quickly cause the pedal and subsequent pedals and amplifiers to become overloaded. Tap tempo is achievable with a digital clock and can, therefore, be integrated into analog and digital pedals. It can be.

In the interest of full disclosure, I never learned rhythmic delay with a calculator; it was shown to me by the owner of my local music store and I was able to just suss it out by feel. Nowadays, many digital delay units are equipped with a Tap Tempo feature. This allows you to choose the rhythmic subdivision quarter-note, eighth-note, dotted-eighth note, etc.

Essentially, it does the math for you. To regenerate quarter-notes, set your Time to ms, your Mix between percent and your Repeat to three. Another spiffy quarter-note delay ploy shown in in Ex. For a groovy swing feel, set your delay Time to ms, your Mix at percent, and your Repeat to one regeneration, so the delayed note hits the last triplet of a beat. Then play Ex. Dotted-eighth delay sets the repeat to land on the last sixteenth-note of the beat, and can essentially make a scale played in eighth-notes sound like a melodic sequence of sixteenth-notes.

As demonstrated by Ex. Mastering tried-and-true delay techniques is a worthwhile and useful endeavor and can certainly enhance your sound.

Once you have the basics down, the possible uses for delay are only limited by your imagination. Reverb Articles. What does a distortion effect pedal do?

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