Effected: Delay

Regenerate Yourself
Delay is one of the most powerful and versatile effects you can have on your board.  Many players are obsessed with it having several delay pedals or complex rack units to summon it’s many textures.  Players rely on delay to thicken up their tone, to create pulsating rhythms or to send a a listener spiraling into fractal complexity.  A modern delay pedal is a Swiss Army knife of tonal possibilities.





Delay Basics
Mix,Time, Repeat 
The easiest way to understand basic delay is the classic example of a natural echo.  When you yell “Hello” into a large empty hallway or auditorium you will often here one or more “hello”s repeating back decreasing in volume.  This is roughly the same principle as delay.
When looking at a delay pedal we can assign the number of “hello”s to the Feedback, Regeneration or Repeats knob.  The length of time between “hello”s is equivalent to what the Time or Rate knob.
Nearly all delay pedals have a Mix or Level knob.  This adjusts the amount of the effected signal that is balanced with the original guitar signal.  In other words, the volume of the repeats.  
Many of today’s modern delay units have an array of additional controls but these three are the most fundamental.
Tap Tempo
Tap Tempo to delay was like DVR/Tivo to Television.  “Wow, you I can actually control this thing now?”  By tapping a button a player can sync up time with other instruments and then select a note division to control the rate.  Finally reliable, predictable delay times!  That is not to say that there’s not some Mojo in taking your chances with a vintage Echoplex, but good luck trying to lock tight repeats with the drummer off the cuff.

Echo through the ages

Vintage Echoplex

In the 50’s and 60’s delay effects were achieved by many analog means.  One early DIY method was to place a mic directly in front of a speaker and one or more mics at various distances and directions in a large hall or room.  The mics would be reached indifferent times with a different emphasis of frequencies and when mixed would create a dynamic echo effect. 

Binson Echorec

Roland Space Echo

Drum n’ Tape
The first delay devices used magnetic tape that recorded a section of music and then played back at the desired time.  The Echoplex came in a huge case and had knobs to control delay volume and repeats and a slider that manually moved the repeat play-head back and forth to select delay time.  The feedback could be cranked so that the unit would self oscillate and then be “played” on it's own.
The Roland space echo used multi-playback heads to achieve what we now call multi-tap delay.  The Space Echo was a very radical design.  Instead of a nice neat reel of tape, Roland used a large loop of tape that would loosely fit amongst various play heads.  Tape arms would move the heads and tape in various directions for powerful, yet unpredictable, sounds.  This unit could also self oscillate and,  given it’s many controls, create a wide range of sounds on it’s own.
A favorite of Dave Gilmour was the Binson Echorec.  It used a spinning magnetic drum with several playback heads and an erase head surrounding it.  This multi-head delay unit was produced in several versions.  Some of these unit's heads could be selected to either play or feedback!  There were also stereo units that had two separate drums with multiple, multi-function heads on each!  Insanity!

Bucket Brigade
By the beginning of the 70’s solid state technology started making all electronics small, more efficient and affordable as was the case for delay pedals.  These devices had shorter delay times but were capable of a voice all there own.  The Electro-Harmonics Deluxe Memory Man is the most classic of the genre and is still very popular today.  The Memory Man uses the classic bucket brigade circuit however the other key to this delays unique voice was it’s modulation section which added a chorus/vibrato effects to the repeats only.


Digital vs. Analog
In the 80’s digital delay started gaining popularity for it’s reliability and programmability.  These delays featured “perfect”, mirror-Image repeats with crisp clarity.  Of course, many fickle guitarists preferred the warm, degraded delays of the analog models.  I feel that both are capable of things the other is not.  Why limit yourself? Today digital recreations of analog delays continue to get more convincing but, of course,  some players still swear by the originals.  Reproductions of tape delays are still made today by boutique companies but they don’t come cheap.  But if you need to have it...
Electro-Harmonics just released the Deluxe Memory Man with Tap Tempo providing analog warmth with the precision of timed delay.  This hybrid concept of digital control over analog components is something that is rapidly growing in gear market.  I think that this is a step in the right direction. Everybody wins.

Deluxe Memory Man with Tap Tempo

Delay Effects
I would classify delay effects into three main families:  Thickening, Rhythmic and Sound-scapes.
There are endless ways to use delay but I feel that they all fit into one of these three categories:

Thickening delays:

Fattening Delay
To simply make your sound bigger.  Great for solo’s.  It covers a lot of slips yet still has definition.
-300 to 700 ms
-3 or 4 repeats and a mix level of about 25%.
-Mix 20-30%

Slapback Delay
A classic echo effect often used in 50’s music and country.  A great supportive tone.
-40-250 ms
-0 to 1 repeat
-25-40 mix

A digital model of the Roland Space Echo

Rythmic Delays:
Delay is a great tool to create complex rhythms.  
The Edge
The Edge’s delays are very complex but here is a simple approximation of his trademark rhythmic delay
-Tap Tempo to dotted 8th notes
-3 or 4 repeats
-50-70% mix

Dave Gilmour

Robert Fripp

Sounds-capes:
The complexities of soundscapes are best left to experimentation rather than a tutorial.  Listen to Robert Fripp and Dave Gilmour to see what can be expressed with the more extreme uses of this kaleidoscopic family of effects.  Characteristic setting often include:
-Long delay times of 1 second or longer.
-Numerous repeats.
-Full feedback to self-oscillate.
-Modulated repeats.
-Multi-tap patterns
-Reverse delay (when the repeats are played back in reverse next to the dry signal)
-Ping Pong (different delay settings panned right and left.)

Delay is an amazing tool but just like any other effect, you need to tinker with it in order to make it work for you.  I recommend you holing yourself up in a room, turn down the lights, calm your mind and start twisting knobs.

-Jay Bois