NPD: NUX DuoTime Delay

[MrShake]

This had been on my radar for a bit. But I've recently realized that I have different musical "personalities" when I play. I approach playing differently depending on the role I'm playing in the arrangement. Almost like different characters. (Obviously, I don't mean this super-seriously, it's a metaphor -- I don't actually have names for them. But I'm pretty sure they have names for me behind my back.)

There is, of course, the shoegaze/punk/post-punk hodgepodge of Mike Prime, but Telecaster Mike plays punk/grunge and loves his all-Boss board, Garage Mike just wants hideous fuzz and reverb, Bass (VI) Mike plays a post-punk board full of old-school modulation (I don't even LIKE phasers!) and analog delay, etc.

I'm finally giving Ambient Mike some room to breathe after he's finally come into his own after 25 years. And rather than him getting to play with Mike Prime's toys, I'm finally indulging him a setup of his own. Mike Prime likes walls and hurricanes of sound and noise. Ambient Mike likes pools of them. He was birthed in the synthetic guitar swell of Donkey Kong Country's underwater level. You know the one.

He needed a multi-delay. I'll save you the rest of his backstory, but my second pedal after a DS-1 was a DD-5, and it got me a long way in high school.



Just arrived this morning. Limited playing time, but a blast so far.

My platonic ideal for the task I need it for would be a pair of DD-5's. (Since I came up on the DD-5, almost every other delay sounds too soft and mushy to me. Go figure.)

They'd need to be tapped from the same tempo, able to be routed series or parallel, but then summed back down to mono 90% of the time.

Which would be possible with some routing and utility gear or using another stereo in directly after it... but this was $88.

With the Digital Delay's "Hardness" set to "pretty hard", this pretty well does the thing, though I'm looking forward to dialing it in a bit more. All of the other modes (likely the Mod and Reverb above the others) are going to be the tasty icing on the sonic cake. (Not the Sonicake, that's elsewhere.)

Definitely going to spend a lot of my downtime in the next few days twiddling.

What say ye?

Oh, in context:

[sal paradise]

This sounds like a recipe for John Peel to rise from the grave and repeat his review from the first time he saw Pink Floyd… which also just happens to be my signature

[MrShake]

This sounds like a recipe for John Peel to rise from the grave and repeat his review from the first time he saw Pink Floyd… which also just happens to be my signature

And it's living in that sweet spot, too -- post-Piper, pre-Dark Side. Stripped of all that Wind In The Willows bunk and just launching direct to the center of your consciousness.

Oh, god, it's happening already, isn't it?

[Unicorn Warrior]

I used a time factors for the soul reason of its dual delay feature and my ability to adjust the milliseconds to a degree that gave me a huge wall of sound mixed with reverb. Something I haven’t been able to quite recreate with my strymon DIG. This looks like it can be adjusted similarly to the time factor’s parameters if I’m not mistaken. What’s your thoughts on it so far?

Recently played Donkey Kong Country again since my childhood, and that song is one of the best in all of video game history.

[MrShake]

I used a time factors for the soul reason of its dual delay feature and my ability to adjust the milliseconds to a degree that gave me a huge wall of sound mixed with reverb. Something I haven’t been able to quite recreate with my strymon DIG. This looks like it can be adjusted similarly to the time factor’s parameters if I’m not mistaken. What’s your thoughts on it so far?

Recently played Donkey Kong Country again since my childhood, and that song is one of the best in all of video game history.

Now, I can't compare it 1:1 to the Time Factor - never had my hands on one. The biggest hands-on difference I would imagine is the NUX has no way to balance/blend each delay. That and some of the more advanced functionality definitely make the TF a more versatile choice. Never used a Dig, either, so I can't vouch for how it can/can't be adjusted, sorry!

But so far, I can either set subdivisions and tap away, or I can get in there and granularly adjust the MS or BPM of each delay. Overall output from the level knob, and each "type" of reverb has 1-2 adjustable parameters with the (yes) "Parameter" knob. I think I still need to do a firmware update on this one so I can dial out/down some of the shimmer on Reverb mode. Along with a blend control, I'd love if it had onboard switching for Series routing (like the Atlantic does). But again, compromises had to be made for a price point, I imagine.

I like that there's only one layer of menu dive for what are pretty clearly tertiary control parameters. I wish there were 1-2 more control knobs for general stuff like the overall mix, and being able to read MS or BPM makes it easier to match to a number of things, including a drum machine.

So, depending on your setup method for getting that wall of sound, I think you could probably do it with this no problem. But in the specifics how you want to get to that, I can't say. I tend to use it more rhythmically/percussively (not exactly The Edge, but I can hear traces of that in my style), so I haven't spent much time using it as texture, more as rhythm. Speaking of The Edge, the Digi and Mod modes on this seems at first blush to have a little more clarity than even the "digital/'80s" setting on the Atlantic and Edge Delay, so I really like the way it cuts a bit better than those.

But, the level of control and versatility it DOES offer, along with the good sound and a wide feature set, make it a no-brainer at under three digits. That's less than most name-brand delay boxes, right? Even at full price, $150 isn't a drop in the bucket for most of us, but it delivers that much delay pedal, for sure.

And I knew I couldn't have been the only one who loved the moodiness of that DKC track as a young future-guitarist. I feel like I would have loved feedback-based volume swells anyway, but I know that helped.

Here's to formative ambient experiences!