Delay and Reverb Pedals

[hans halmackenreuter]

hello folkes,

on thursday I am going to buy a delay and a reverb pedal and I have already made a list of pedals I want to check out. the tc hof and flashback is also on my list and from the paper this could be a good way to go, but I read about quality issues. are these rumors or valid information?

Anyway I am really excited which pedals will win the contest for being my new gear. I sold my zoom g5 because in the end I was just useing delay and reverb most of the time and two pedals are a lot better to transport than a giant multi-fx board.

So here is my list:

delay
-tc flashback
-boss dd7
-ehx memory boy

reverb
-tc hof
-digitech hardwire RV7
-ehx holy grail plus

from the papers and of course in this price range, the hof is first choice, but we will see what reality will tell me. but I think that it will be a though decision with the delay pedals.

[Timo]

I have the EH Memory Toy (the smallest one) delay pedal and the TC Hall of Fame reverb- both excellent pedals. Highly recommended.

[palindrome]

from the papers and of course in this price range, the hof is first choice, but we will see what reality will tell me. but I think that it will be a though decision with the delay pedals.

I have a Digitech Hardwire RV7. Although it's a great pedal, I happen to find a predelay option very useful, so I would probably swap it for a TC Hall of Fame any time. And since you essentially lean toward this latter pedal anyway, wouldn't it be logical enough to go for the TC Flashback in front of it, given the straightforwardness of hooking both up? (In the delay department, I for one wouldn't part with my MXR Carbon Copy.)

[jorgemg1984]

I think these pedals will also be an upgrade from the Zoom sounds...

The delays: the flashback is very good, if you the time you can use the toneprint editor and create any delay you want!! I like it much more than the other two.. Same for HOF. The RV7 is nice but more digital and present... the HOF for more subtle stuff is perfect. And with the toneprints and the editor it's like buying a new pedal every week

I never had or heard of quality issues and I am sure TC will back up their products!

About other options... I will have a sprint theory soon. It seems perfect if you only want spring and digital. About delays the MXR is nice but not enough delay time AND you can get the flashback to sound the same with the editor.

[feet]

my input, tangential and otherwise:

delay
-tc flashback- people love the tone prints. never used one, but i used to have a nova delay, and that was a great all in one, but, for my needs, i felt that it did too much and it was a little "jack of all trades" for my tastes. if you need a lot of delay sounds, tc isn't a bad choice. if you are after a specific delay type/sound (tape, analog, digital), its possible you could do better.
-boss dd7- no experience.
-ehx memory boy- i also have a memory toy. its very analog, for want of a better term. its dark, thick and distorts (in that pleasing analog way) pretty early. you can increase the headroom with a buffered pedal somewhere in front of it. i especially like it with some gain. its cheap, sounds great, but its sort of a specific thing. it does that one sound, but does the hell out of it.

reverb
-tc hof- no experience.
-digitech hardwire RV7- i had a supernatural, which is the next gen version, super modulated of this. the straight spring and plate verbs were excellent. as i understand it, the rv7 is a nearly as good, meat and potatoes kind of thing. solid, affordable.
-ehx holy grail plus- i still like this thing. though i have better and (much) more expensive delays, i couldn't bear to part with this. its a great, straight up amp sounding pedal. sounds marginally better with the ehx power supply than it does with a one spot. not a flerb guy, but spring, hall and room could cover most of your needs. underrated, i think.

in general, i used to have a lot of pedals that did a lot of things and i found i preferred both simplicity and specificity, especially with verb and delay. once i cycled through enough pedals (and there were a lot) to find out what i really liked and wanted, i ended up with pedals that did just one thing transcendentally, rather than pedals that did everything pretty well. but like i said, it took a long time and a lot of wasted time and money to get to this point. also, its worth noting that i'm not trying to cop a bunch of different sounds, just my sound.

in the interest of sharing, a flint, belle epoch and dark echo anchor the big board, a dispatch master and mini reverberator or on the nano and a memory toy and holy grail plus are on the derelict ("jazz") board.

[hans halmackenreuter]

I have a Digitech Hardwire RV7. Although it's a great pedal, I happen to find a predelay option very useful, so I would probably swap it for a TC Hall of Fame any time. And since you essentially lean toward this latter pedal anyway, wouldn't it be logical enough to go for the TC Flashback in front of it, given the straightforwardness of hooking both up? (In the delay department, I for one wouldn't part with my MXR Carbon Copy.)

to be honest, the tc pedals are on th pole position , but I have make my own experience.

[hans halmackenreuter]

I think these pedals will also be an upgrade from the Zoom sounds...

The delays: the flashback is very good, if you the time you can use the toneprint editor and create any delay you want!! I like it much more than the other two.. Same for HOF. The RV7 is nice but more digital and present... the HOF for more subtle stuff is perfect. And with the toneprints and the editor it's like buying a new pedal every week

I never had or heard of quality issues and I am sure TC will back up their products!

About other options... I will have a sprint theory soon. It seems perfect if you only want spring and digital. About delays the MXR is nice but not enough delay time AND you can get the flashback to sound the same with the editor.

yeah, I guess it would be an upgade.

I think it was just bad rumor about the qualtiy.
I will check out if they have the spring theory, maybe this is something good. thanks for the suggestion.

[hans halmackenreuter]

my input, tangential and otherwise:

delay
-tc flashback- people love the tone prints. never used one, but i used to have a nova delay, and that was a great all in one, but, for my needs, i felt that it did too much and it was a little "jack of all trades" for my tastes. if you need a lot of delay sounds, tc isn't a bad choice. if you are after a specific delay type/sound (tape, analog, digital), its possible you could do better.
-boss dd7- no experience.
-ehx memory boy- i also have a memory toy. its very analog, for want of a better term. its dark, thick and distorts (in that pleasing analog way) pretty early. you can increase the headroom with a buffered pedal somewhere in front of it. i especially like it with some gain. its cheap, sounds great, but its sort of a specific thing. it does that one sound, but does the hell out of it.

reverb
-tc hof- no experience.
-digitech hardwire RV7- i had a supernatural, which is the next gen version, super modulated of this. the straight spring and plate verbs were excellent. as i understand it, the rv7 is a nearly as good, meat and potatoes kind of thing. solid, affordable.
-ehx holy grail plus- i still like this thing. though i have better and (much) more expensive delays, i couldn't bear to part with this. its a great, straight up amp sounding pedal. sounds marginally better with the ehx power supply than it does with a one spot. not a flerb guy, but spring, hall and room could cover most of your needs. underrated, i think.

in general, i used to have a lot of pedals that did a lot of things and i found i preferred both simplicity and specificity, especially with verb and delay. once i cycled through enough pedals (and there were a lot) to find out what i really liked and wanted, i ended up with pedals that did just one thing transcendentally, rather than pedals that did everything pretty well. but like i said, it took a long time and a lot of wasted time and money to get to this point. also, its worth noting that i'm not trying to cop a bunch of different sounds, just my sound.

in the interest of sharing, a flint, belle epoch and dark echo anchor the big board, a dispatch master and mini reverberator or on the nano and a memory toy and holy grail plus are on the derelict ("jazz") board.

thank you feet for sharing your experience and of course for the time you spend with your reply
I use to have a lot boss pedals and a tremonti wah in the past, but the signal was a mess and it was a pain to stomp on everything, so I decided to use multi-fx (a boss me70, than a boos gt 10 and than a zoom g5). Know I am back to single pedals and know I now that I just use delay an reverb. Maybe I will buy an envelope filter in the future, but first things first.

[Spook410]

I had a temporary problem with a new TC HoF reverb pedal. It was noisy. I read about doing a software upgrade (HoF pedal connects to your computer via a mini-USB) at the TC site and did this. Afterwards everything was fine. I don't believe it was actually a revision problem. More likely some memory had become contaminated and the overwrite corrected it. It's been fine ever since.

I don't think the HoF is the absolute best reverb around but I like being able to download reverbs to try from the TC website, the 'Church' setting is actually pretty good, and it meets all my needs at a satisfying price point.

[hans halmackenreuter]

I had a temporary problem with a new TC HoF reverb pedal. It was noisy. I read about doing a software upgrade (HoF pedal connects to your computer via a mini-USB) at the TC site and did this. Afterwards everything was fine. I don't believe it was actually a revision problem. More likely some memory had become contaminated and the overwrite corrected it. It's been fine ever since.

I don't think the HoF is the absolute best reverb around but I like being able to download reverbs to try from the TC website, the 'Church' setting is actually pretty good, and it meets all my needs at a satisfying price point.

maybe this was the issue. Thanks for telling me/us. I really got confident about forgetting the quality rumors.

I know that's probably not the best reverb pedal, but I don't make a living as musician, so I guess I can live with the fact, that I won't have "the" best reverb.

[BigDaddyLoveHandles]

I've had no quality issues with TC. I have a HoF and Ditto Looper and a Corona Chorus. (And a Spark Booster on the way.)

The Toneprint option is very cool -- I've downloaded Steve Morse's "beautiful" reverb -- but it's overwhelming if you want to design your own toneprint!

???

[jorgemg1984]

It's not the best but it's excellent... a few years ago you would need a rack to have such nice reverbs. The software is indeed hard to use... but it's quite easy on the delay.

[hans halmackenreuter]

I'm pretty sure, that I will buy the tc pedals tomorrow, but nevertheless I want to try them first and compare them, that's why I don't buy them online. It might a bit more expansive because I have to get to Hamburg in order to enter a real music store, but it's also good to spend some time in a real store with a bunch of fancy toys. I mean I am happy that I have got some small store's in my town, but they just have cheap guitars and some boss pedals and than everything they have is for teenies with rock music in mind.

one last question: the power supply?

battery is not really an option for, because you always need backup and it's not really enviroment friendly.

lets say that I buy these two tc pedals, which power supply would be best, since they don't have their own tc- powersupply units! I know that it should be a 9v dc, but there are good and bad ones. and can I daisy chain them?

thanks in advance

hans

[BigDaddyLoveHandles]

I daisy-chain with the 1 Spot power supply. I haven't noticed any noise problems -- my rig is very quiet. Start with that and upgrade to a big power supply if you need it?

[calgarc]

i use good ol fashined ableton live, for all my effects needs , but i doubt thats is the route you want to go

[palindrome]

one last question: the power supply?

I have found these to be cheap, effective and handy for 9-volt pedals. Easy to connect and disconnect and toss around. Most importantly, I have not experienced any noise issues with them (unlike with Thomann's switchable wall wart that can go up to 12 volts). I dont't believe that sound quality would get compromised per se through cheaper adapters.

http://www.thomann.de/de/thomann_ntac109.htm


The Boss 9-volt adapter is sort of an industry standard but is more expensive:

http://www.thomann.de/de/boss_psa_230.htm


For daisy chaining, you could use this solution by Ibanez in conjunction with a sufficiently powerful adapter (you'd have to make sure that the power requirements of both pedals do not exceed what the adapter can provide, since digital pedals, and reverbs in particular, consume disproportionately more power than your average overdrive pedal; for the same reason, battery life would be way too short for these pedals anyway *unless* you think of this on a gig-by-gig basis).

http://www.thomann.de/de/ibanez_dc3.htm


There is also a DC5 version of this, although for up to three 9-volt pedals or so I would personally prefer the aforementioned Thomann adapter. For setups including more pedals with different voltages, I like this one for its versatility (and don't be fooled by its limited number of 9-volt slots; the thing includes a lead with multiple connectors to operate several 9V pedals with modest power requirements through a single one of these 9-volt slots).

http://www.thomann.de/de/trex_fuel_tank_chameleon.htm

[hans halmackenreuter]

@palindrome: thank you for your suggestions. I really appreciate it. I use to have the boss psa with daisychain cable, when I had my boss pedals. It worked well, but if something cheaper will do the job aswell, than I will take my chance.

@calgarc: It's awsome what you can do with computers nowadays, but in my opinion it's not handy enough. If you record something, then this could be a great tool, but not for normal situations.

[hans halmackenreuter]

I daisy-chain with the 1 Spot power supply. I haven't noticed any noise problems -- my rig is very quiet. Start with that and upgrade to a big power supply if you need it?

now I got your post. the 1 Spot power supply is a power supply from visual sound. excuse me it's late.

[jorgemg1984]

How many pedals will you use total? Just these two? If so get two of those 10€ Thoman, cheaper than the daisy chain If it's more check the HB Power Supply on Thomann, 30€ and it powers 5 pedals.

[lumena]

look at this first.

http://www.strymon.net/bigsky/

[pkirk]

I daisy-chain with the 1 Spot power supply. I haven't noticed any noise problems -- my rig is very quiet. Start with that and upgrade to a big power supply if you need it?

I second that: I got a 1spot (25$) recently and it worked out well for my reverb, distortion, delay, and the Zoom stomp multi FX I use occasionally. I also use an EHX superego, and a tube preamp, they each require their own power supply.

[BigDaddyLoveHandles]

look at this first.

http://www.strymon.net/bigsky/

Needs more knobs.

[hans halmackenreuter]

after a day of fun I ended up with a hof and flashback and a boss psa powersupply with daisychain cable. So today I want check out the tone print function.

here a bad picture from my mobile