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Post subject: Delay. What is it?
Posted: Fri Sep 20, 2013 8:20 am
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Ok dudes, I got a new one for you. Thank you, as always, for all the advice you pros are always giving me here.

Why does everyone say that "delay" is one of the "must have" pedals? What's the deal? You "tap" to set the delay. Are you supposed to know in advance what the drummer's tempo is going to be? I don't get what's the deal with delay and what I mean is why does everyone say "you need an overdrive, distortion, and delay" and everyone talks like they always use delay?

I've never used delay but I'm starting to mess with bells and whistles on my mustang amp just to try things out. (I have purposely concentrated for 2 years on simply trying to learn how to play using only clean and overdrive and left 99% of my mustang's capabilities unused, and I don't regret that....but now I'm trying to see what this delay love is all about.)

Thanks.


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Post subject: Re: Delay. What is it?
Posted: Fri Sep 20, 2013 9:03 am
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Her Wanna wrote:
Why does everyone say that "delay" is one of the "must have" pedals?

Not everyone does. There's no law on that - though I'd definitely fall into the camp of feeling delay is one of the two or three pedals I have to have in my rig.


Her Wanna wrote:
why does everyone say "you need an overdrive, distortion, and delay"

Well, I for one don't say that. With an amp that crunches the way I like (my Marshall TSL, in my case) all I want on top is compression and delay. And even those aren't vital: pure guitar+amp takes some beating. Everything else is an optional extra.

Still, delay is a great way of adding some "space" to your sound. A bit like reverb, but a bit different too. Like other effects, using less delay rather than more is often good advice. "Can't quite tell it's there, but miss it if it isn't" - is frequently a nice way to go. Just the merest hint of echo is a fine way of plumping up your sound.


Her Wanna wrote:
You "tap" to set the delay. Are you supposed to know in advance what the drummer's tempo is going to be?

There are many different ways of using delay. Having the drummer and guitar echoes locked together should be used judiciously, I'd have thought, though it's probably done a bit more often on recordings than live. But if guitar delay decays and drum beats do need to be sync'd then there's only two ways to do it: by the drummer matching the guitar or vice versa. Tap tempo makes the latter possible.

To me, much more useful than tap tempo is a delay with a digital display, so you can set the exact speed you require, rather than guesstimating it. Also, a delay with some memory pre-sets is very handy, so you can have a slap-back, a short, faint delay and a longer, stronger one all available at the touch of a toe. For this reason I like the Boss DD-20, which does all of that and much besides. Similar functionality is available from other makers.

Cheers - C

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Post subject: Re: Delay. What is it?
Posted: Fri Sep 20, 2013 10:11 am
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Feed the drummer and yourself a click track from a drum machine, use MIDI clock to sync the delay speed to the song tempo and BAM, no need to tap tempo anything and you're all guaranteed to be in sync from the get go.

I use a Boss slicer pedal that responds to MIDI clock and has a nice little flashing light to show me the tempo. If your delay doesn't respond to MIDI clock then you can figure out the required delay in milliseconds, 60,000 divided by the beats per minute gives you the time in milliseconds for a quarter note.

I like to use a dotted 8th followed by a quarter note double delay, so that's 375ms and 500ms at 120bpm. Yay science.

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Post subject: Re: Delay. What is it?
Posted: Fri Sep 20, 2013 12:44 pm
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Ceri wrote:
To me, much more useful than tap tempo is a delay with a digital display, so you can set the exact speed you require, rather than guesstimating it


Digital will never let you set anything exact, because there will always be steps - for exact, you need analog.


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Post subject: Re: Delay. What is it?
Posted: Fri Sep 20, 2013 1:00 pm
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Ceri wrote:
Her Wanna wrote:
Why does everyone say that "delay" is one of the "must have" pedals?

Not everyone does. There's no law on that - though I'd definitely fall into the camp of feeling delay is one of the two or three pedals I have to have in my rig.


Her Wanna wrote:
why does everyone say "you need an overdrive, distortion, and delay"

Well, I for one don't say that. With an amp that crunches the way I like (my Marshall TSL, in my case) all I want on top is compression and delay. And even those aren't vital: pure guitar+amp takes some beating. Everything else is an optional extra.

Still, delay is a great way of adding some "space" to your sound. A bit like reverb, but a bit different too. Like other effects, using less delay rather than more is often good advice. "Can't quite tell it's there, but miss it if it isn't" - is frequently a nice way to go. Just the merest hint of echo is a fine way of plumping up your sound.


Her Wanna wrote:
You "tap" to set the delay. Are you supposed to know in advance what the drummer's tempo is going to be?

There are many different ways of using delay. Having the drummer and guitar echoes locked together should be used judiciously, I'd have thought, though it's probably done a bit more often on recordings than live. But if guitar delay decays and drum beats do need to be sync'd then there's only two ways to do it: by the drummer matching the guitar or vice versa. Tap tempo makes the latter possible.

To me, much more useful than tap tempo is a delay with a digital display, so you can set the exact speed you require, rather than guesstimating it. Also, a delay with some memory pre-sets is very handy, so you can have a slap-back, a short, faint delay and a longer, stronger one all available at the touch of a toe. For this reason I like the Boss DD-20, which does all of that and much besides. Similar functionality is available from other makers.

Cheers - C


Thank you very much for this (as always) great explanation.


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Post subject: Re: Delay. What is it?
Posted: Fri Sep 20, 2013 1:11 pm
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GilgaFrank wrote:
Feed the drummer and yourself a click track from a drum machine, use MIDI clock to sync the delay speed to the song tempo


now that's rock & roll defined right there! :twisted:

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Post subject: Re: Delay. What is it?
Posted: Fri Sep 20, 2013 1:30 pm
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arth1 wrote:
Ceri wrote:
To me, much more useful than tap tempo is a delay with a digital display, so you can set the exact speed you require, rather than guesstimating it


Digital will never let you set anything exact, because there will always be steps - for exact, you need analog.


I suppose that the extent of 'exact' would depend on the precision of the analog device components?

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Post subject: Re: Delay. What is it?
Posted: Fri Sep 20, 2013 3:19 pm
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I don't use delay I've tried just don't like it fo me. There's no pedal that is a must have for me. I use a overdrive a little. I get most of my overdrive the natural way. I don't own a distortion pedal. I give props to those who can tie a bunch of pedals together and make it sound good it's just not me.


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Post subject: Re: Delay. What is it?
Posted: Fri Sep 20, 2013 4:07 pm
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Post subject: Re: Delay. What is it?
Posted: Fri Sep 20, 2013 4:41 pm
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strings10927 wrote:
GilgaFrank wrote:
Feed the drummer and yourself a click track from a drum machine, use MIDI clock to sync the delay speed to the song tempo


now that's rock & roll defined right there! :twisted:


MIDI clock sync on the slicer pedal and delay times ...

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Post subject: Re: Delay. What is it?
Posted: Fri Sep 20, 2013 5:03 pm
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arth1 wrote:
Ceri wrote:
To me, much more useful than tap tempo is a delay with a digital display, so you can set the exact speed you require, rather than guesstimating it


Digital will never let you set anything exact, because there will always be steps - for exact, you need analog.

arth1, I'm talking about a digital display, not whether the effect itself is digital or analog. The LCD display on the Boss I mentioned, for example, lets you set the exact number of milliseconds you require each time you use it, which just twisting a knob and listening does not.

Cheers - C

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Post subject: Re: Delay. What is it?
Posted: Fri Sep 20, 2013 5:40 pm
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Ceri wrote:
arth1 wrote:
Ceri wrote:
To me, much more useful than tap tempo is a delay with a digital display, so you can set the exact speed you require, rather than guesstimating it


Digital will never let you set anything exact, because there will always be steps - for exact, you need analog.

arth1, I'm talking about a digital display, not whether the effect itself is digital or analog. The LCD display on the Boss I mentioned, for example, lets you set the exact number of milliseconds you require each time you use it, which just twisting a knob and listening does not.


Oh, I know what you meant, but that's not exact. You have a granularity that can't be better than 1 ms. For a 5 minute song, that means +- 0.3 seconds off at the end.
With analog, you're only limited by the precision of the mechanics. The adjustment dial inside a mechanical wristwatch, for example, is far more accurate than that.

In short, digital must per definition always be inexact. You can't set a time dial to be exactly 1/3 of a measure, because 1/3 would be approximated as 0.33 or 0.333 or 0.3333 - never precise.


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Post subject: Re: Delay. What is it?
Posted: Fri Sep 20, 2013 6:17 pm
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arth1 wrote:
You have a granularity that can't be better than 1 ms. For a 5 minute song, that means +- 0.3 seconds off at the end.


No, that's simply not correct. The delay time - the time between the first input audio signal and the delayed effect - will stay the same throughout the song. If you hit a chord in bar 1 then the delay will come after 500ms. If you hit a chord in bar 1000 then the delay will come after 500ms and will ALWAYS be in time.

Your figure of +/- 0.3 seconds would only apply if you hit a chord in bar 1 and kept the delay feedback on 100% and expected the delay of that one chord to remain in time throughout the song.

arth1 wrote:
In short, digital must per definition always be inexact.


Sorry but that is also incorrect. Or at least inaccurate or irrelevant.

If the song is 120 bpm then each quarter note is (60/120) * 1000 = 500 ms. If you set your delay to 500 ms and play at 120 bpm then the delay is exactly in time, there is absolutely no error there. Yes, there be me inaccuracy if the millisecond calculation comes to a fractional value but modern effects processors tied to MIDI clock and with specified NOTE length rather than delay ms time get round this.

The FX processor samples and plays back delay signals 48,000 times a second, do you really think it can't allow for .3 of a second?

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Post subject: Re: Delay. What is it?
Posted: Fri Sep 20, 2013 6:55 pm
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GilgaFrank wrote:
No, that's simply not correct. The delay time - the time between the first input audio signal and the delayed effect - will stay the same throughout the song. If you hit a chord in bar 1 then the delay will come after 500ms. If you hit a chord in bar 1000 then the delay will come after 500ms and will ALWAYS be in time.

Only if you have an external time source and disregard the beat of the delay. If, on the other hand, you adjust your beat to fit the delay, you'll be off at the end of a long song.

GilgaFrank wrote:
arth1 wrote:
In short, digital must per definition always be inexact.


Sorry but that is also incorrect. Or at least inaccurate or irrelevant.


Irrelevant, yes - the inaccuracies of digital tend to average out, or be corrected for, or synchronized. But inaccurate, no. What's inaccurate is to use the word "exact" when you mean digital applied to a measurable quantity, as opposed to a countable quantity. Per definition, digital has steps, and can never be more exact for measures than the steps. That may be more than good enough, of course, but that's not the same as exact, any more than "infinite" means "an awful lot".

GilgaFrank wrote:
If the song is 120 bpm then each quarter note is (60/120) * 1000 = 500 ms. If you set your delay to 500 ms and play at 120 bpm then the delay is exactly in time, there is absolutely no error there.


Sorry, no - that depends on where you get the beat from. It can be accurate enough, or much more accurate than you need, but that's not the same as exact.

GilgaFrank wrote:
The FX processor samples and plays back delay signals 48,000 times a second, do you really think it can't allow for .3 of a second?


But see, many of us don't play 1 second songs with a single beat. The inaccuracies accumulate and drift over time, which is why we have a time source in the rack, synchronizing. They aren't exact either, but they make sure that all the inexactness is synchronized.
If you could trust every digital device to be exact, authoritative (and inexact) time sources would not be needed. You can't, so they are.

Again, it's the inexact language use I oppose - it leads people to believe that digital implies exact. It doesn't.


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Post subject: Re: Delay. What is it?
Posted: Fri Sep 20, 2013 8:00 pm
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arth1 wrote:
GilgaFrank wrote:
No, that's simply not correct. The delay time - the time between the first input audio signal and the delayed effect - will stay the same throughout the song. If you hit a chord in bar 1 then the delay will come after 500ms. If you hit a chord in bar 1000 then the delay will come after 500ms and will ALWAYS be in time.

Only if you have an external time source and disregard the beat of the delay. If, on the other hand, you adjust your beat to fit the delay, you'll be off at the end of a long song.



Please explain how a 500ms delay at the end of a 120 bpm song song is out of time when a 500ms delay at the start of the same song is in time.

arth1 wrote:
GilgaFrank wrote:
arth1 wrote:
In short, digital must per definition always be inexact.


Sorry but that is also incorrect. Or at least inaccurate or irrelevant.


Irrelevant, yes - the inaccuracies of digital tend to average out, or be corrected for, or synchronized. But inaccurate, no. What's inaccurate is to use the word "exact" when you mean digital applied to a measurable quantity, as opposed to a countable quantity. Per definition, digital has steps, and can never be more exact for measures than the steps. That may be more than good enough, of course, but that's not the same as exact, any more than "infinite" means "an awful lot".


Soo ... you can hear this inaccuracy? Or are we just debating tine insignificant mathematical inaccuacies?

arth1 wrote:
GilgaFrank wrote:
If the song is 120 bpm then each quarter note is (60/120) * 1000 = 500 ms. If you set your delay to 500 ms and play at 120 bpm then the delay is exactly in time, there is absolutely no error there.


Sorry, no - that depends on where you get the beat from. It can be accurate enough, or much more accurate than you need, but that's not the same as exact.


Again, totally wrong. the value of 500 ms is EXACT and the FX processor will be ACCURATE. Please explain how a 500 ms delay can be out of exact time in a 120 bpm song.


arth1 wrote:
GilgaFrank wrote:
The FX processor samples and plays back delay signals 48,000 times a second, do you really think it can't allow for .3 of a second?


But see, many of us don't play 1 second songs with a single beat. The inaccuracies accumulate and drift over time, which is why we have a time source in the rack, synchronizing. They aren't exact either, but they make sure that all the inexactness is synchronized.
If you could trust every digital device to be exact, authoritative (and inexact) time sources would not be needed. You can't, so they are.

Again, it's the inexact language use I oppose - it leads people to believe that digital implies exact. It doesn't.


Digital delay times are far more exact than anyone can audibly discern.

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