the twisted world of guitar pedals II

Meanwhile I had the opportunity to put my hands on some Fairfield Circuitry effect pedal stuff mentioned earlier here and the “Meet Maude” analog BBD delay was right here on my desk for a deeper inspection. My actual experience was a rather mixed one.

Focusing on a rather dark and LoFi sound quality on the one hand plus a rather simplistic feature set concept wise on the other, they do not appear to be very flexible in practise and this at a rather steep price point. They appear to be very noisy featuring all kinds of artifacts even when integrated to the mixing desk via reamping. One may call this the feature itself but at the end it makes it a one-trick pony. If you need exactly that, here you have it but you get nothing beyond that. To me this trade off was too big and so I send it back.

However, I found their nifty low pass gate implementation (very prominently featured within their “Shallow Water”) that much unique and interesting that I replicated it as a low pass filter alternative in software and to have it available e.g. for filtering delay lines in my productions. The “Shallow Water” box made me almost pull the trigger but all in all I think this stuff seems to be a little bit over-hyped thanks to the interwebs. This pretty much sums it up for now, end of this affair.

Timeline & BigSky – The new dust collectors?

Going into the exact opposite direction might be a funny idea and so I grabbed some Strymon stuff which aims to be the jack of all trades at least regarding digital delay and reverb in a tiny stomp box aka desktop package. To be continued …

Further readings about BBD delays:

• the Ibanez AD202 analog delay
• the Dynacord VRS-23 analog delay

the twisted world of guitar pedals I

Quite recently I had a closer look into the vast amount of (guitar) effect pedals out there. Most are already DSP based which surprised me a little bit since I still ecpected more discrete analog designs after all. While looking for some neat real analog BBD delay I finally stumbled across Fairfield Circuitry’s “Meet Maude” which got me intrigued, having a rather rough look&feel at first sight but some very delicate implementation details under the hood.

Their delay modulation circuit has some randomness build in and also there is a compression circuit in the feedback loop – both designs I’ve also choosen for NastyDLA and which makes a big impact on the overall sound for granted. But the real highlight is the VCF in the delay feedback path which actually appears to be a low-pass gate – a quite unique design and soundwise also different but appealing in its very own regard.

They employed very similar concepts to their vibrato/chorus box “Shallow Water” featuring also random delay modulation and a low pass gate but this time a little bit more prominent on the face plate. On top, their JFET op-amp adds some serious grit to any kind of input signal. All in all, I did not expect such a bold but niche product to exist. If I ever will own such a thingy, there will be a much more detailed review here for sure.

the Dynacord VRS-23 analog delay

(click images to enlarge)

The VRS-23 was a quite successful BBD delay in the 80’s and some thousands of units were sold during that time. It’s a mono-in / stereo-out device and capable of delay times up to around 400ms. Providing also very short timings and a modulation option makes it capable of creating chorus and flanger type of effects as well. There were different revisions available and shown here is a later one with the white faceplate.

the Ibanez AD202 analog delay

The so-called bucked-brigade device (BBD) delay line generator is a somehow quirky and really unique technical design. Such  devices are built upon analog components entirely, but being discrete in time they are halfway digital. Their analog input voltage samples are stored and moved through a line of capacitors one step after another and hence the name comes from analogy with the term bucket brigade: a line of people passing buckets full of water.

the classic chorus echo device

Beside the usual suspects when it comes down to the individual classic echo or chorus devices there were also some combined devices build around true tape delays or bucket brigade delays (BBD). Looking from todays production standards they might be easily overseen and this is no wonder since their golden decade refers back to the 1970s right before the digital delay devices emerged during the 1980s.

Some example devices are:

• Rockman Stereo Chorus/Delay
• Roland DC-30 Analog Chorus-Echo
• Roland SRE-555 Chorus-Echo
• Roland RE-501 Chorus-Echo
• Ibanez AD202 Analog Delay
• Yamaha E1010 Analog Delay
• Dynacord VRS23

Beside the delay unit itself they typically contain a Chorus/Flanger/Ensemble sort of effect as a switchable option or offer a direct and straight delay line modulation instead. Comparing them to todays feature blown digital delay units they might appear feature wise rather poor and limited but in some cases they were groundbreaking to their time providing a sound palette ranging from smoothest chorus goodness up to weird and feedback distorted audio fx oddness. This and their unique sound quality is probably the charm which still today attracts producers and audio engineers to use this sort of stuff.

Does the list miss some crucial device and are you still using such device and why?