So after years of neglecting my guitars, I'm trying to finally spend the time and money to get some decent equipment and figure the instrument out. I've been collecting a small assortment of pedals lately so that I can put together a really good pedal board, and I'm looking to pick up a quality (at least midrange priced) delay pedal.

I was looking at an EH deluxe memory man, but don't really want to shell out $300 for a single pedal at this point in time, and they're hard to find used. Anybody have any recommendations? Something that I could really mess around with and create some interesting sounds. Anybody have anything they're looking to get rid of (that goes for other pedals as well)?

the memory man is great, I have a super old seventies model with a boost input, its noisy as hell and its got a classic sound HOWEVER the line 6 and boss multi delays do produce some great results.

also, the chorus/vibe section of the EH is worthless.

The Memory Man is magical but it takes up a ton of real estate.

The big green line 6 thing is about the same size and gives you three presets and a tap. It's a nice box and built like a tank - I think you can get them for a couple hundred on ebay. I also really liked the modulation line 6. Cool Leslie sounds and some nice variations on tremolo.

the other one a few people have recommend to me is the mxr carbon copy. Any thoughts anyone?

not familiar with that one...two good resources are

www.musictoyz.com
www.harmonycentral.com

I'm running both a T.C. Nova Delay and a Malekko EB600 Bright right now.

Both will set you back about the same on the used market($175 - 200), it just depends on what you're looking for. The Nova has presets, Reverse delay, tons of modes. The Malekko is more of a boutique job but sounds just insanely good.

IMO, the best "bang for the buck" in a straightforward, great sounding delay right now would be the Carbon Copy as you've been told. It's a quality box, but it's a little on the dark side for some people's tastes.

Another good resource is proguitarshop.com, if not just for their video demos of every pedal alone. Just click on the delay category on the side and go nuts.

The Boss is a solid pedal with lots of options, if not a lot of on-the-fly flexibility. They won't fuck up and break, and they won't color your sound much. And they're half the price of the line 6 and memory man. So is the Pre Set option important enough to you?


Having said that, I've been using a $45 Ibanez Sound Tank plastic pedal that a guy left at my house in high school in 1992 for 17 years now. I want slapback delay for country, and it works perfectly for it. All this talk of how pure the signal path is, and how many gajillions of options you have, really I just never found it all very necessary in practice. I set it, leave it alone, and use it, and it sounds just fucking fine. I have other stuff to worry about usually, than tapping things on and off my feet.

Yeah, you can definitely make things more complicated for yourself than you need to. Something to be said for set-it-and-forget-it.