Effects Pedals – Delay

As well as playing, practicing and learning new things, another large part of being an electric guitarist is literally out of your hands. I am talking about the other side of electric guitar – effects pedals.

An effects pedal is a small box that changes the sound of the guitar. You place it on the stage near your feet. It has a switch that you operate with your foot to turn the effect on or off, and some small knobs to control the parameters of the effect. Usually you set these before the performance and only use the on/off switch during a show. When it is turned on the effects pedal will change the sound of the guitar (or other instrument).

There are many different ways that you can change your sound. In this first part we will look at delay. A delay effect simply plays back what you have just played. There are various parameters that you can control, the most basic of which are as follows:

-       Delay time – this sets the time (in milliseconds) between the initial sound and the first repeat

-       Feedback – this controls how many repeats there will be. A setting of zero means there will be only one repeat.

-       Mix – this controls the relative volume of the original signal and the delayed version. It is easiest expressed as a percentage. With the knob on 0% you can only hear the original. At 50% you can hear an even mix of the original and the repeats and all the way over to 100% means you can hear only the delays.

Just by varying these three parameters you can use the delay pedal to create different effects.

1.      A slapback delay, reminiscent of early rock ‘n’ roll. This is where the delay time is very short, between 50-100ms and not many repeats (feedback set close to zero). This example is at around 70ms.

2.      A rhythmic, galloping delay. Set the delay time to a dotted 8th note ( ).

3.      Use delay to add atmosphere to a solo

4.      Using an older style tape-delay means that the sound deteriorates over time like on an old dub/reggae recording.

5.      By setting the feedback all the way to the right the pedal is feeding back on itself. This by itself doesn’t sound so great. But varying the delay time as well creates some crazy effects. You can hear something like this at the end of Karma Police by Radiohead.

There are many different delay pedals on the market and they all offer various features, as can be seen www.sweetwater.com and www.guitarpedalstore.com. Some try to emulate an older piece of gear, some emulate many different older pedals in one unit, some have a loop sampler and some do backwards effects. The best thing to do is to get down to Jinling Dong Lu and try them all out.

In the coming editions we will look at different effects, including flanger, chorus and distortion.