Wonderful delay!

Incredible pedal for the price. The tap divide is so brilliant, and for under 200 bucks, definitely the best delay on the market for the money. Any other tap divide/modulation capable pedals with the amount of depth the Deluxe Memory Boy has are astronomically more expensive. So much fun to play with.

Best Analog Delay

This is the best analog delay I have used. It is loaded with features, which is something you don't typically find with analog delays. The tap tempo feature makes life a lot easier when playing live. I haven't found another analog delay that gives you this much control. As far as the sound goes, its clean and natural, not digitized like with digital delays. You can get some funky tones out of the delay if you mess with the depth control. The only change I would like to see is for the tap tempo button to be a momentary switch instead of a catch and release switch. That would enable the user to dial in faster delay times by foot. I will be modding my pedal with a new switch, not too difficult, but it'd be nice if it came that way stock.

Bang for your buck

On my never-ending quest for ultimate delay Nirvana, I had found myself transitioning from digital to analog. This is part of a natural progression, or really regression, that many guitarists are following these days. I have been playing guitar for 14 years and my first delay was a Boss DD-5, which I still have and use. But will I much longer?

To begin my quest I asked myself what features I would actually use. Am I going to ever need a reverse delay live? I might, but I need it more than one of the other features on my DD-5? Absolutely not. For the last few years my DD-5 has been used to tap tempo my delays to fit a variety of songs. No monkeying with dials. No nonsense. Just good old repeats. So of course the first thing that attracted me to this pedal was the built in tap tempo. That saved a bit of real estate on my board, freed up some unsightly cables, and allowed me to utilize some of the funkier things a digital delay like the DD-5 can do.
But does the tap tempo really cut the mustard? The tap button is not great in all honesty and the blinking LED is entirely unhelpful (though it does look cool blinking on my board). The tap button is sensitive enough to tap in your tempo without it even clicking which would be great but you can still click the button in and this sometimes causes what I believe are double counts on the tempo and really messes up the timing. I have gotten better at it but it does not behave like other taps I've used and I was a bit disappointed at first.

This leads me to why I really bought this pedal. Tap tempo is great but the hardest thing about it is tapping in tempos for subdivisions. The subdivisions button on this guy is almost the entire reason I took the plunge. I have seen this on other pedals before but they were always a lot more expensive. I love playing triplet delay lines but some drummers have trouble locking tempo with them and I'm not about to triplet tap in the middle of an intricate line to catch my delay up. This all seemed a little too good to be true. It kind of is. Yes I can tap a 4 count and get my perfect triplet time but at this point I will come full circle and say this is analog delay. A much warmer delay with a lot of loss in clarity as the delay starts to feedback. That's a great sound but when you're trying to pull off a fast triplet line, it can swallow you. I will however, continue to work on perfecting this art since this feature is so valuable to me.

The rest of the features are what you would expect from Electro-Harmonix. There is a lot of added "fluff" that doesn't really bring any more value to the pedal. The ability to hook an expression pedal is great but kind of a gimmick.

So it really does come down to asking yourself, "Why am I buying a delay pedal". What is it that attracts you about this pedal? If you really feel you need a pedal with such versatility that it borders over complication and feel you NEED analog delay, this really is a great bang for your buck at under $200. Maybe you're looking to use this for recording. Sitting down and using the dials to really nail your tempos, repeats, and sounds, this could be a mighty pedal. If you, like I, need the tap tempo and subdivisions, I would certainly recommend this pedal. But if you are like many people who really just want a great delay sound to fill the gaps and add depth to your tone, you're barking up the wrong tree.

Sometimes less really is more. In the delay department, I would not consider this to be anything special, but for its features. I put all my money on the MXR Carbon Copy for everything I don't need to tap in.

What went wrong

I was convinced this was the pedal for me. Analog, not too big, expression pedal output, two buttons, 9v power supply and generally everything I need.

Two problems:

1) There's some weird modulation on the delay even when the depth button is at 12 o clock. It gets weirder when you turn it to either side, and in every way it sounds super weird and is IMO completely unusable! It sounds kinda like an envelope filter

2) Brilliant feature adding the expression pedal and the switchable options. But for some reason there's no option for controlling the volume of the delay which would be the most important thing!

Too bad... It looked so promising