Welcome to our quick guide to Types of Delay delays. We’ll look at the major types of delay and what you may want to look for to capture the tone you crave…
Delay is one of the most popular effects for any guitarist, and it crosses genres with the different type of delay out there.
Let’s start with an overview of the main types of delay
There are three main ‘types’ of delay available, most pedals will fall into one or more of these categories. Let’s take a quick look at each type.
Tape Delay
Believe it or not it was actually one of the most famous names to grace any guitar (Les Paul) who pioneered the idea of recording a guitar signal onto tape and then playing it back. And so was born the Tape Delay.
There have been many versions, some famous names are the Watkins Copycat, Maestro Echoplex, and Roland’s Space Echo. These units give a very special vintage tone and is the reason they are still used to this day, however they are notoriously unreliable (thanks to all those moving parts) but they give such an organic tone that most of us love the effect they produce.
Plus, it’s all over some of the most iconic recordings even laid down, on guitar, keyboard, and vocals (think Robert Plant vocals).
These days there are a rich vein of different options to replicate this vintage tone. From units that still have tape-based systems, to digital replications, and some of them really get super close to a perfect recreation. Catlinbread Belle Epoch, Empress Tape Delay (one of our favourites), Keeley ECCOS or Magnetic Echo, Wampler Faux Echo and many more give you a route into this effect.
You can look for single or multi-head delays, with extra features such as replication tape wear, tap tempo and more.
Analog Delay
In the search for something more reliable than a tape delay, Boss released the first analogue delay pedal in 1981.
You may have heard of the term ‘bucket-brigade’, well that’s the type of chip we’re looking at hear. These chips are famous for a particular type of degrading delay signal. The term comes from the idea of a bucket of water being passed from one person to the next in a chain of people fighting a fire. As you can imagine, the water gets spilled out as it goes from person to person. And in a similar way, your original signal from the guitar degrades with each repeat of the delay. This gives a very distinctive sound that gets darker and warmer for each repeat. It can really ‘fit in’ with your guitar and create a sense of space and depth without dominating things.
Again, these days you don’t have to buy an analogue pedal to get this effect. Many digital based units also replicate this effect nicely. You’ll be thinking of pedals such as Mad Professor’s Deep Blue Delay, Walrus Audio ARP87 etc. Both are digital recreations of this classic tone, and they both nail it.
If you must have true analogue, look at MXR Carbon Copy, Boss DM2w and many, many more…
The drawback of true analogue can be the length of delay, so keep any eye on that.
Digital Delay
Again, it was Boss who got the ball rolling here back in 1984, just three years after their analogue pedal.
A digital style delay gives you a set of delays that don’t degrade in the same way as analogue. You get crisp, accurate representations of your original signal. Further you can have very long delay times with this type of pedal, so you can push the creativity with the delay effect.
There are many digital delay pedals out there, so take your time choosing. We like the various modes of the Walrus Audio ARP87 (it has a lovely tone overall and some great flexibility), but why not look at the Keeley Caverns V2 (which has a reverb in there too), or many, many others.
Look for features such as ‘trails’ and of course, we’d recommend a tap tempo on a digital delay, but maybe we’ll talk about tap tempo in another blog. Oh, and there’s also modern multi-digital delays, but that’s for another blog too.
So that’s a quick guide to delays from tape to analogue to digital. We’ll add more to this series when we can. But if you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to drop us a line.
