The following is a guest post by Kevin Ian Common. If you are interested in guest posting, please contact me!
Hello Kind Readers!
Today I’d like to talk about my newest pedal acquisition, the Boss DD-20 GigaDelay. I recently acquired this pedal used. I love delays, and it is really unfortunate I can only fit three on my board right now!
What drew me to this effect is the “Twist” mode. It slowly ramps up and downthe delay time, creating a slow oscillating effect. This effect is similar to turning the regeneration to maximum on an analog pedal and messing with the delay time. This is a lovely feature for adding quick ambient textures to your playing. The “Warp” function also allows you infinite repeats–something also great for short ambient bursts!
Going through the functions, I have found many of the parameters useful. I’m not much of a “warm, dark” repeat guitarist most of the time, so the tone function was really nice in giving me either really dark or bright repeats. I really like the dual head delay setting as well, as I can choose two different delay times and it simulates turning on two delays at one time… something I really enjoy doing!
I chose this pedal because it gave me enough options for the price. I am a big fan of what I call the “Helicopter Delay,” which was made well known by The Edge of U2 and various other bands of that genre. I have an MXR Carbon Copy, but the settings were always slightly different, and it was hard to find the right setting after going into an oscillation frenzy! Having the ability to instantly recall settings has made a big difference in my creativity — I don’t have to stop and find the “sweet spot” when practicing or writing.
I have included two videos. One is the ProGuitarShop Demo. I love Andy’s work! The second is a video of my band, The Common Men during our recent stint at Capital Public Radio. I use the “Twist” function often towards the end of the song. Enjoy!
Kevin Ian is a multi-instrumentalist. He primarily plays guitar and sings in The Common Men, a Post-Punk trio based out of Northern California. He also currently hosts an Alternative/Electronic/Ambient show on www.sacrockradio.com entitled “The Mad Owl.” You can find everything Common Men related at his new website, www.thecommonmen.tk
Andy’s video:
The Common Men:
The Boss DD-20 Giga Delay is available for $229.00 at Musician’s Friend.
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12 years ago
anyone know of a delay with a built in LFO that only does slow detuning [like if you’d slowly crank the delay time longer after you played a note, but with none of the increasing pitch you’d get after re-setting the delay time]? I’d like to use it for piano. I managed to get something similar on my RE-20 with one hand on the time knob and an expression pedal controlling delay volume, but i’d like to play more than one hand worth of keys at once.
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