Recording - October 2019 - 64

Reviews by Mike Metlay

Arturia

3 Delays You'll Actually Use
Arturia is on a roll with its series of '3 Things You'll Actually Use'
plugins. The mission of these effects bundles is as plain as their
titles: if you've been needing a [fill in the blank] for your DAW signal
chain and you're confused by the huge number of choices out there,
you can pick up a bundle of three diverse and easy to use options from
Arturia and put them to work immediately.
This month, we're reviewing 3 Delays You'll Actually Use, and there
are some sweet surprises in store.

Picking and choosing

With previous bundles, Arturia arguably provided some easier
choices. Three preamps? Neve, Trident, Telefunken. Three compressors? UREI, dbx, Sta-Level. Three filters? Minimoog, Oberheim
SEM, Oberheim Xpander. None of those sets are comprehensive,
but they all cover a considerably wide swath of possibilities and
leave no major gaps. When you get to delays though...
Delay and echo have been around as effects for nearly 75
years. In the search for a reliable and musical way to create
spaciousness and rhythmic interest, engineers have worked
with reel-to-reel tape recorders, tape loops in bins, rotating metal discs, spinning drums filled with oil, analog bucket-brigade
delay chips and finally, digital memory. Each type of delay
has its own sound, quirks, advantages, and shortcomings, and
every kind of delay has its rabid fans and detractors. As editor
of the forthcoming book, PEDAL CRUSH (pedalcrush.com), I've
covered dozens of these devices, old and new, and I've developed a real appreciation for how varied the landscape truly is.
With that in mind, it's obvious that there's no way any set of
only three devices could please all the delay fanatics out there,
or even come close. Arturia responds with a novel solution: two
choices covering the two most famous types of delay mechanism-
tape, and analog bucket brigade-and one digital delay that's
not an emulation of any particular historical device, but rather
an idealized model that gathers together many of the features
found in modern digital delay designs.

Common features

All three delays feature a universally useful core set of capabilities. Their basic controls are identical: left and right delay times (which can be linked and/or synchronized to your
DAW tempo), feedback, input and output levels, and wet/dry
mix. Each delay can output left/right, ping pong, or mid/side,
and there are controls for stereo offset (small variations in delay time between channels for more spaciousness) and stereo
width (from mono to colossal stereo). Each delay's input stage
is designed to model the analog saturation or breakup of the
64 RECORDING October 2019

original hardware when pushed. All three feature a dropdown
panel with advanced features, and a three-band equalizer with
highpass, lowpass, and midrange peak filters. A six-waveform
LFO with syncable tempo and assignable destination completes
the picture. Finally, there's a dropdown preset menu loaded
with great sounds to help get you started.

Delay MEMORY-BRIGADE

The Electro-Harmonix Memory Man was the first affordable
analog delay pedal, and nearly every analog delay produced
since then owes something to this classic box. Delay MEMORY-BRIGADE features include chorus/vibrato (tied to an
'amount' knob to mess things up), and a switch that takes the
original's 550ms maximum delay time up to 1100ms, with no
change in sonic character. The Advanced menu includes an
envelope follower routable to many different destinations to
create delay effects that follow playing dynamics-something
the original couldn't dream of doing.
The Memory Man was not a classically 'good-sounding'
delay-it wasn't very transparent, and its modulation features
ranged from subtle to seasick. Still, it was a great alternative to
tape-based echo units costing four times as much, and it found its
way into a lot of rigs (including mine). Delay MEMORY-BRIGADE
brings back wonderful memories of the Memory Man's slightly
metallic tonality and animated modulation character, and it's
great for everything from rock and metal to indie pop-especially
when you slam the input stage to make it distort!

Delay TAPE-201

Apologies to fans of the Maestro Echoplex-to my mind, the
Roland RE-201 Space Echo was the tape echo machine to beat
in the 1970s and beyond. Delay TAPE-201 reproduces all of the
original's features: three delay taps that can be activated in various

http://www.pedalcrush.com

Recording - October 2019

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Recording - October 2019