This next article on is on Delay. It’s meant for beginner to mid-level worship musicians. Advanced worship guitarists might benefit out of this too.

DL-4 Delay

Delay, as you know, replicates the initial sound and reprocesses it. You can usually dictate the amount of repeats (how many times the signal is processed again), the length inbetween each repeat, effect level (how loud the repeats are), and on more advanced delays add some modulation. Modulation adds either Chorus or Tremolo to the effect.

Common digital delay pedals we recommend:

• Boss DD-5 (no longer in production, check eBay)
• Boss DD-7
• Line 6 Echo Park
• Digitech DigiDelay

More advanced pedals are the:

• Line 6 DL-4 Delay
• Boss DD-20 Gigadelay
• T-Rex Replica

Analog Delays

• Boss DM-2
• Ibanez or Maxon AD9

So I mentioned Analog Delays. There are two different types of circuitry in the delay world which is analog or digital. Analog delays are described as warmer and have an authentic sound, but aren’t usually tap tempo. Digital delays are pretty sterile, but are very clean. Digital delays usually have different settings you can choose from. You can also use tap tempo. Tap tempo is used for locking in the actual tempo of the song. There aren’t many analog pedals you can tap tempo in. If you were to buy your first delay pedal get a digital pedal.

How to use a digital delay:

The reason I left out a pedal like the Boss DD-6 is because you don’t get the option of using a tap tempo pedal. This is vital. A tap tempo pedal attaches to your Boss DD-5 or DD-7 so that you have an extra footswitch for tempo in addition to your on/off. It becomes very useful.

Different modes explained:

The modes I’ll explain right now are certain time-based modes such as Quarter, Dotted Eighth, 100ms, etc… Quarter delay repeats whatever you just played in quarter note values. This is very useful for beefing up the sound if you’re the only guitarist playing both rhythm and lead with a four-piece band.

The second mode is Dotted Eigth. The best I can explain the effect with text is it sounds like a freight train (i.e. chigga chigga without the woo! woo!). Anyway, Dotted Eigth is really made famous by the band U2′s lead guitarist The Edge (Darrell Evans Howes). He is so good that they’ve given him a pretty cool nickname. A really good song to listen to in order to understand this effect is Where Streets Have No Names. If you want to listen to a worship song listen to:

• Forever - Chris Tomlin (see Daniel Carson’s instructional)
• Time Has Come - Hillsong United (see Michael Guy Chislett’s instructional)

The Dotted Eighth is being used more and more these days by worship lead guitarsts. You end up doing less work and some how play more. It’s very useful for rhythm-oriented lead parts. You should get familiar with it. It will be your best friend.

That’s all for Delay right now. We’ll bring some more advanced stuff like Swell Delays and Delay Layering, and other cool stuff you can do with Delay. Cheers =D