Delay settings for lead and rhythm guitar

What the knobs do

Time, also labelled Delay, sets the gap between the note and its echo. Feedback, also labelled Regen or Repeats, sets how many echoes follow. Turned far enough, most delays keep repeating and build into a howl of their own; BOSS notes that the DD-8 can oscillate at some Feedback settings.

Level, also labelled E.Level or Mix, sets how loud the echoes are, and the scale differs from pedal to pedal. BOSS says the DD-8's E.Level matches the volume of the dry sound at 3 o'clock, while MXR says the Carbon Copy's Mix is all echo and no dry signal at its maximum. So start low and bring the level up until you can just hear the repeats behind the notes.

Set the time from the tempo

Divide 60,000 by the song's BPM for a quarter note in milliseconds. Halve that for an eighth note, and take three quarters of it for a dotted eighth. A song at 100 BPM gives 600, 300 and 450 ms; one at 140 BPM gives about 430, 215 and 320 ms.

Tap tempo takes the arithmetic away: tap the beat on a footswitch and the pedal sets the time. Many delays have it on the pedal itself, and the DD-8 takes an external footswitch for it.

A dotted-eighth delay turns a line of steady eighth notes into a pattern that fills the gaps between them, which is why it suits arpeggiated parts. It needs the level fairly high to be heard as part of the rhythm rather than as an echo.

Lead delay

Start at 300 to 500 ms, or a quarter note or dotted eighth at the song's tempo, with two or three repeats and the level low. The repeats should fill the space after each phrase, not cover the next one. If the solo sounds washed out, lower the level before you lower the feedback.

Darker repeats stay out of the way of the notes you are playing. Analog delays and tape-style modes do this on their own. The MXR Carbon Copy is an analog bucket-brigade delay with up to 600 ms and switchable modulation, and the BOSS DD-8 has an Analog mode and a Tape mode, the second with the wobble of a tape echo unit, alongside its clear Standard mode.

Rhythm and slapback

Slapback is a single echo close behind the note, roughly 80 to 150 ms, with the feedback at its lowest and the level close to the dry signal. It thickens a clean or crunch part without sounding like an effect, and it is a staple of rockabilly and country guitar.

For chords, keep the time short or in tempo and the level lower than for a lead. Long, loud repeats under strummed chords turn them into a wash.

Echo on the records

Tape echo shaped a lot of classic lead tones. Eddie Van Halen ran an Echoplex between his guitar and his Marshall on Eruption, with a separate Univox echo on the final note, and Eric Johnson's chain for Cliffs of Dover also had an Echoplex, between a Tube Driver and a Marshall.

David Gilmour's Comfortably Numb solos carry delay on the recording, and Slash's Welcome to the Jungle uses it for accents rather than as a constant wash over the part.

Where delay goes

After the drive pedals. A delay in front of a drive pedal gets its repeats distorted along with the notes, which smears them together. With an amp that makes its own distortion, the effects loop is the cleanest place, because the repeats join the signal after the preamp has done the distorting.

In front of a clean or lightly driven amp, the amp's input works fine, and before effects loops were common it was the only place: Van Halen's Echoplex sat in front of his Marshall. If the repeats sound muddy with a dirty amp, that is the reason, and the loop is the fix.

With reverb, put the delay first, so the reverb softens the echoes along with the notes. The other way round, each echo repeats a reverb tail and the sound clouds over quickly.

Delay settings for one song on your amp

These settings are starting points for the pedal. How the repeats sit depends on the amp, the gain and where the delay goes in the chain, so the same setting lands differently from one rig to the next. When you want one song's whole chain set for the amp you own, Tonelify works out the positions for that rig, delay included.