New Pedal Order Day: Delay into Drive

Everyone needs a stompbox.
Post Reply
User avatar
MrShake
PAT. # 2.972.923
PAT. # 2.972.923
Posts: 1201
Joined: Tue Oct 24, 2006 5:51 am
Location: Boston, MA
Contact:

New Pedal Order Day: Delay into Drive

Post by MrShake » Mon Sep 26, 2022 6:10 am

tl;dr - old dog, new tricks

Grew up playing punk and postpunk and shoegaze. The punk was always more of the "chunky rhythm" variety - Ramones, Lookout Records, etc. A few years ago, once my echoes-n-reverbs side started to merge with my fastloudrules side in our current band, I realized that East Bay Ray of the Dead Kennedys had been a REALLY insidious, sneaky influence all along. By the time I was out of college, I found Jello Biafra more and more exhausting, and appreciated the DKs' musicality more and more. All that atmosphere and echo and Morricone and surfy twang with punk and garage-style speed and aggression. When I was 14, I'd fast forward past the intro to "Holiday In Cambodia", now I rewind to hear it again.

Now, I'd always grown up playing "pedal platform" amps, because for the first long while, it was all I could get my hands on. I'm 40 now, and even a medium-sized Midwestern US city was a different gearscape back then. So as a kid with a DS-1, a DD-5, and a clean amp, delay went at the end. It worked out well, I stayed digital for my delay, kept preferring clean amps, and nowadays I'm into atmospheric and rhythmic dotted eighths in a "bluesless-White Stripes-meets-Hawkwind" sorta thing. Big, Siouxie "tribal toms" drums with a bunch of fuzz and reverb and A-string drones and some echo.

EVERY once in a while, and only at home, I'll put a Fuzz Face into a wah into delay into a Marshall(-type) amp, fire up the drum machine to 6/8, and pretend I'm playing a terrible version of "Maggot Brain"... but it's just not my skillset, even though I've always loved the way the dirt after delay makes the echoes scream. But whenever it's been in my hands like that, I just end up sounding like one of the legion of terrible Hendrix impersonators.

But with my ever-growing appreciation of Klaus and Ray's work in the Kennedys, I was watching a clip of Ray talking about his rig, and he described how he always had his delay (usually an Echoplex, I believe, but now a Line6) going into a dirty Marshall. His explanation was that he set the gain so that as the volume of the repeats dropped, they would clean up, so that the last repeat was basically clean. It was so simple, but I'd always struggled with delay-into-drive because our stuff usually has a medium-pulse sorta motorik-adjacent beat, and it just gets cluttered at that speed, no matter how accurate my rhythm chop is.

It was my lightbulb moment.

So, after... 20-*mumbles* years of guitar playing, I think I FINALLY understand how to make delay into a dirty amp (or before a touch-sensitive drive pedal like my beloved Rat) work for me. Swapped the Kmise delay in front of the Donner "Rat" on my mini-board, just to have a quick way to mess around. I twiddled it around, set it for "Police Truck", then slowed down the time for some really nice smeared-out space-drone.

More proof that playing with pedal order and settings is so much more important than just buying a new limited-edition frazzdazzler.

Image

User avatar
sal paradise
PAT. # 2.972.923
PAT. # 2.972.923
Posts: 3596
Joined: Thu May 27, 2021 12:41 am

Re: New Pedal Order Day: Delay into Drive

Post by sal paradise » Mon Sep 26, 2022 11:00 am

Congratulations on getting new sounds after all these years!

I’ve been into high gain amps since about 2000, so never thought twice about delay into drive.

My touring setup from 2012-2014 was:
TS9>other pedals>Flashback X4>Laney GH50 (or JCM2000)
I have nothing to offer anybody, except my own confusion?

Post Reply