Reviews

[smooth55]

So, I'm bored at work and starting looking at gear online. I'm currently thinking about adding a delay pedal to my rig. Up until this point I've used multi-effects delays mostly but I'm thinking of getting a dedicated unit. Naturally, I've tried a few out but I also wanted to read some reviews from various sites to see about things like reliability, etc. Again, pretty slow day at work... In the process of doing that, I was on the GC website (I know, that's probably where I went wrong in the first place). I noticed that one of the reviews written there was a cut/paste job from GuitarGeeks' website in it's description of the Boss DD-3. I don't know why I'm so suprised by this, but at the same time, you'd think that even if it was a GC employee trying to hype sales, it's not that hard to come up with a pitch for the pedal. Why the cut/paste description...?
As for the delay pedal features, aside from tap tempo, is there anything I should be looking for in the pedal or is digital delay simply digital delay?

[chaos731]

Man, I've tried every digital delay under the sun, and my current favorite (taking up real estate on my board) is the TC Nova Delay. It's like the Boss DD-x series, but ramped up and perfected (in this guy's opinion, anyway). Lots of options, wide variety of delay types/flavors, has a knob that you turn to make the delay sound more digital (sharper decays) or more "analog" (increasingly "muted" or "fuzzy" delays). Not only does it have tap tempo, but it also has a "strum tempo" feature, where you press and hold down the right side button (which momentary mutes the delay signal...but not everything else), and then you strum or pick to the desired temp, and then release the button. The delay will perfectly set the tempo to whatever you've picked/strummed. Incredibly useful and smoothly implemented feature, it is. One other feature I like is the ability to modulate (subtly pitch shift) the delay signal (not the original signal), which can really accurately simulate true tape echo effects. On top of that, there are a ton of useful presets, if you're feeling particularly lazy.

I couldn't be happier with the Nova. It does everything I could possibly want a digital delay to do, and then some. Oh, and wait until you get a load of the reverse delay settings...truly kick-arse sounds. It isn't cheap...msrp is something like $249usd, but it's worth every penny.

I was a Boss DD-x hound for a long time, but there was always something, I don't know, missing. The Nova filled whatever inexplicable hole there might have been. Try it out, man...you'll dig it.

Alternately, the EH Deluxe Memory Man is a good choice, if that kind of thing is your cup of tea.

Happy hunting!