Posts Tagged “delay”

I did a quick video demo of the new strymon pedals and thought I’d share. I’m using my G&L ASAT Bluesboy into my Fryette Sig:X clean channel. I’m using the RAILhead Effects PURE to boost the amp into some light breakup. I didn’t spend a whole lot of time with lots of different settings – it just kinda gives you an idea of the character of these pedals.

Anyway, if there’s anything that you want to hear in particular, let me know.

I showed up for soundcheck this morning, plugged in my guitar/pedalboard, strummed a chord and – nothing. I spent a few frantic minutes troubleshooting and determined that my new delay (Tech21 Boost DLA) was the culprit.

The LED turns on, but it won’t pass a signal. At first it kinda worked, but I could hear it sputter out and die completely. I’m afraid it’s probably an IC chip or something, but it’s impossible to get to any of the components without completely desoldering the input jacks as well as the DC jack since they’re all soldered directly to the board. It’s a really stupid design, IMO.

I guess I’ll contact Tech21 customer support  tomorrow to see what they can do for me as far as repairing it. My experience with them will affect whether or not I purchase any more of their products.

I made it through the service okay this morning. I still had another delay on the board (Ibanez DE-7), so I wasn’t completely delay-less. I had to do the dotted eighth thing on one song, so I manually dialed in the delay time to be pretty close and just turned up the delay mix for that one song. It wasn’t perfect, and I had to tweak it a little at the beginning of the song, but it worked out okay.

I think that once I get this delay fixed, I will probably just get an Eventide Timefactor or something like that since there are no more Timelines to be had. Why did I sell that freaking thing? Oh yeah, to buy that Line 6 M13 that I already got rid of. Facepalm.

I got rid of my DD-20 delay after a couple of months of frustration. I got it because it has presets, external tap, LED display, etc. I had one before and I thought that it could be my swiss army knife, all-purpose delay. It has a lot of sounds in it, but they all seem too harsh and brittle to me. On top of that, it’s not very easy to tweak on the fly. Short of going back to a huge MIDI setup (like I used to have with the Damage Control Timeline) I think I’m just going to have to have a couple of different delays on the board if I want access to multiple delay sounds.

I replaced the DD-20 with the Tech21 Boost DLA. I just wanted to go with a relatively basic delay with tap tempo that doesn’t mess with your dry signal. It has a buffered bypass, but that’s not such a bad thing if it’s at the end of the effects chain.

I would like to be able to tell you how it sounds, but I haven’t even plugged it in yet. We’re closing on a new house in a week, so we’re in the middle of packing right now. All the demos that I watched/listened to sounded really nice, and it’ll probably work out pretty well. I like that it has knobs rather than buttons and menus. I’m not sure if I’ll use the boost feature very much at all, but it’ll be nice to have it just in case.

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I installed my Tremol-no last night. I’m tired of all my strings going out of tune whenever I change one string. I haven’t messed with it a lot yet, but it seems to be a lot more stable now. I’ll post an update once I’ve had a chance to give it a go.

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I emailed Mike at ANALOG.MAN Effects and he said that I don’t have to order the King of Tone pedal right away. That’s a good thing, since I don’t really want to wait another 18 months. I’ll probably buy it once we’ve had a chance to buy some furniture and stuff for the house.

I have had a little time to spend with the M13, so I guess it’s time to share some thoughts. First impressions are that this thing is very cool. I haven’t messed with all the sounds yet, but a lot of them sound great.

First of all, the delays are awesome. There are a bunch of different ones to choose from, and they’re all very tweakable. I’m very happy about the inclusion of the Lo-Res delay from the DL4. I owned a DL4 for a couple of weeks, and the Lo-Res delay was my favorite sound on the pedal. Unfortunately, it was accompanied by an unacceptable volume drop, so it had to go. The M13 seems to have corrected this unfortunate situation.

Anyway, I used it at church on Sunday and it was really easy to dial up a few basic delay tones that worked really well. I set up two delays in series (tube echo dotted eighth > analog echo w/mod dotted eighth) and it was perfect for the U2/modern worship thing. I initially had the mix set too high, but it was easy enough to tweak on the fly.

The M13 has an effects loop, which enables you to place external stompboxes within the effects chain. On Sunday I didn’t have this set up, so all of my distortion pedals were in front of the M13 which didn’t work out too well. Because of this, I decided to try out a couple of the M13’s overdrive pedal tones. I ended up using the tube drive model, which is supposed to be designed to sound like the Chandler Tube Driver. Anyway, I was pleasantly surprised to get some totally usable tones out of it. Granted, the digital models aren’t as organic as the analog counterparts, but it’ll work in a pinch. My main gripe is that the digital overdrives don’t really clean up with the guitar’s volume control or a light pick attack. Since Sunday, I have rearranged my board a little and put the od/distortions into the loop. It sounds much better this way.

I really like using expression pedals with this thing. There are obvious uses like wah, whammy, and volume control, but you can assign the expression pedal to manipulate any parameters that you want. It can be as simple as using the exp pedal to control the gain setting on your overdrive pedal. However, you can use the pedal to change every setting on any given effect. In the heel down position, you could have a dry digital delay setting with low repeats, moderate feedback, and no modulation. The toe down position could be a very warm self-oscillating delay with infinite repeats. Of course, as you sweep back and forth, you get a blend of the two delay sounds which gives you a lot of flexibility in controlling your tone. Right now, I only have one expression pedal but I will be picking up a second in the very near future.

In short, I am pretty pleased with the M13. I have decided to sell my Timeline delay pedal as well as the Rocktron MIDI controller that I was using with it. If you’re interested, let me know…