Delay Effects

Here's a very informative post from a new contributor, Ronald, from Holland, on tweaking your delay. The portion on the United Live guitarist's delay is also very useful, and saves you the trouble of alternate picking songs like An Introduction and Take it All.


By Ronald

I want to give you a lesson about using delay in your sound. The things I’m going to tell you are things I use in my playing.

First of all I’m using the Line6 guitarport computer based software to play through. I just plug it in to the mixing consule and play. I have made a custom pedal board to switch between the different patches.

That’s about that. Now for the delay. I have a digital, analog and tube delay to choose from. I like the first to most. Very important with the delay is the time setting.

I can set the time of my delay through:

Tempo of the song vs. the length of notes.

So in formula form that is: 60 / bpm x length of note

Length of note values:
Whole note = 4
Half note = 2
Quarter note = 1
Dotted eight note = 0.75
Eight note = 0.5

So if a song is in 100 bpm and I want to use a dotted eight note this gives me:
60 / 100 x 0.75 = 450ms

No I don’t have to do this. My program does this for me, but if u use a simple delay pedal u can use this formula.

The Line6 products and Boss DD2 have both functions on it where you can set the length of the note by tapping the beat of the song on a pedal (tap tempo).

Next is which kind of situations, you can use the different note length of notes in.

Dotted eight note
I use the dotted eight note setting most of the time. This is also the most used setting of the Edge of U2 (Where the streets have no name) and Bad (both stereo delays but with this setting).

Michael Guy Chisllet also uses this setting on almost every song,from songs like “an introduction – The time has come” to “Fire fall down”.

U can use this setting on song where you play straight eight or sixteen notes. This setting fills up the spaces between the notes u play. So you get a very full drowning sound. Be careful with the repeats. 1 or 2 are just fine.

Quarter note
This is a setting you can use when playing sparse riffs or licks. Or just single chords. 2 or more repeats will do fine with this setting.

Eight note.
This is a setting I don’t use much. I mostly use it on busy songs, where a lot is happening. For solo’s it’s also a very safe setting. 3 or more repeats will do on this one.

Quarter note + Eight note triplet.
This is the Nigel Hendroff setting. You have to have 2 delays and stack them on top of each other. He uses this very much with songs like Salvation is here, Higher and Mighty to save. A couple of repeats will do just fine.

When you don’t have 2 delays just use the Eight note triplet setting. It will do just fine and it sounds nice.

Well that all for now. If you want to no more about delays feel free to ask. I leave you with just one quote of the Edge on effects and delays.

"I've found so many guitar parts from using the echo - it's limitless. The biggest difference between me and other players is that I don't use effects to color my parts. I create guitar parts using effects. They're a crucial element of what I do so I don't consider them a crutch... They're a part of the art." - Edge, 'Total Guitar', 2005