Delay delay delay. I know, right? In the span of two months, I’ve done delay crazy. I’ve always liked the sound of a delay effect in music, and I used Ableton’s or Reason’s delays in pretty much everything I made before I fell down the hardware hole. At that point it got a bit more difficult since much of what I record and post doesn’t make its way into Live or any other DAW. Rather it’s just recorded into Wave Editor, exported, and posted. So until my friend Greg gave me his old Boss DD-3 in July, I was without delay.

That’s all different now. If you go back and listen to the stuff I’m posting, pretty much everything since July has some kind of delay effect in it. Sometimes it’s disguised as reverb, but it’s delay. After playing around with that Boss delay pedal for a bit, I wished for more control over the effect and got the Flight of Harmony Sound of Shadows module, which I wrote about previously. It’s a fun and lovely device, but it’s like the Boss DD-3 the way that a Panther is like my cat. I mean, they’re both “delays” but that doesn’t mean that they’re anything alike. Then the other day I came across an Electro-Harmonix Stereo Memory Man pedal on Craigslist. I picked it up yesterday and spent several hours with my modular synth plugged into it last night. In addition to most of the stuff that the Boss does, the SMM also loops, and is as the name implies, in stereo. Stereo is good because it has a default ping-pong left-right delay when a mono signal is plugged in. Furthermore since I like to use my Doepfer A134 panning VCA, it allows those two inputs. It would be great to be able to set each side with a different time delay, but since I’m not getting rid of the Boss, I can still do that (Boss on one side, Memory Man on the other). Another reason to keep the DD-3 is that it’s got a really nice sound as the delay rate is adjusted. While the Memory Man just cuts the delay until the new speed is reached, the Boss does it more naturally, adjusting the pitch. More like a tape delay. I’ll record these and post them at some point.

I recorded more than an hour of sequences run through the Memory Man, with much playing with the Sound of Shadows as well. It will take some editing to pick out the gems. But in the mean time this fifteen minutes was interesting to me and shows off the looping of the Memory Man, a couple of the delay modes, and has a lot of SoS as well (for the second half or so of the piece one can really hear the difference in the way they delay. Controlling the rate of the SoS’ delay adds something completely different, like a mocking tone or some kind of screwed up circus).

did you hear that? by dance robot dance