What are your personal prefernces when it comes to delay? Analog or digital? How important is a tap tempo? Should you take up half of your pedal board with the Line-6 or can you get by with a single pedal boss delay? Thanks for your input!

I don't use a delay on bass, but I play with three guitarists who do. All three favor digital and two use Line 6 multieffects with the tap tempo feature. I like the tap feature, especially on some of the more modern arrangements we do. Guitarist 1 uses Line 6 DL4 pedal ($250). The other uses the Line 6 M13 Stompbox Modeler, which is loaded with other effects besides delay and costs $500. The third guitarist uses a single Boss pedal and it sounds good, but he uses it sparingly.

It really depends on how much you use delay, but over the years I've grown really accustomed to having my delay times in sync with the tempo of the song, so tap tempo is really important unless I'm in the studio and have time to bend down and tweak the knob to match the song. In a live situation, anything from a Boss DD-5, Boss DD-20, Line 6 DL4 will work just fine. I really like the t.c. Nova Delay with 9 presets, tap tempo, multiple variations (tape/analog/delay sim, modulation, dynamic ducking, ping pong). I currently use a Line 6 M13 along with an expression pedal to alter the mix levels of different delays. I like the Analog w/mod model as well as the Digital w/mod model and if I'm stereo, I use the Ping Pong delay a lot too. If you have time between songs to tweak or if you don't use a lot of delay on a regular basis I tend to prefer an analog delay and a great one for the money is the MXR Carbon Copy pedal, which has really long delay times (for analog) as well as modulation and it's easily tweakable across the whole range of the knobs.

I'm old enough to remember when the Echoplex tape delay was the ONLY one available. When Electro-Harmonix came out with the Memory Man, everyone was stunned. Can't complain about the quality of even cheap pedals these days.

I love delay, but I can't seem to find a "cheap" pedal that's good enough. I love the Boss pedals, but I can't see me paying $150+ for a single pedal right now.
Any suggestions?

Trev:

I'm a bassist, but the guitarist in my band use the Line 6 DL4 ($250) and the Line 6 M 13 multieffect ($500). Boss and Digitech have units around $%100 butI have no idea how flexible they are. If you plan to use echo or chorus and "swell" effects a lot and would use amp modeling and sitortionm yopu might want to spend the extra moiney for the Line 6 M4, whcih is still $400 but will gibe you more than 100 effects including a looper and amp modeling.

Good call.
Although I've always wanted a fancy multi-pedal effects board, I'll check it out.
I just don't have the money to build my dream board yet. Haha

I do know that TC Electronics now makes two great Delay Pedals for guitarists - not sure what they're about but if they are anything like the TC 6000 we have in the studio - I'm sure it rocks!

I dug my little $20 behringer. Really clean delay but nothing fancy. No tap tempo or anything. It's good to experiment with though.

Hey all! I thought I'd share 2 of my delay pedals here. I use a Guyatone MDm5 micro digital delay. I use it for more of the "in your face" delay effects. It's clean, small, true bypass and built very well.

The other unit is a Maxon AD999 Pro. This is an analog delay with 3 multi-taps to simulate tape echo multi-head operation. I use this pedal to add space to my sound instead of reverb. It's very smooth and natural sounding without adding too much of a reverb tail to muddy the clarity of my notes. I got the idea from Steve Lukather. This pedal stays on 90% of the time I'm performing!

Interesting! Why not jump over to the Review Form and do a couple of writeups?

Laklander - Hey! I'm in Philly...small world. I just did a review on the Godin Multiac SA. I'll probably write some reviews on the pedals as well