Q: I recently purchased a compact Boss DD-6 Digital Delay. It sounds great when I use it with a clean guitar sound, but when I crank up my Marshall amp and then use the master volume to produce a fat overdrive, I get way too many repeated notes – as if I had cranked up the delay’s feedback. What’s the deal?
A: First off, there’s nothing wrong with your delay or your amp.
When you use an effects pedal with a clean guitar setting, the controls for delay time, feedback, and so forth have a certain effect.
However, when you crank up your amp to get fat overdrive with a lot of sustain, the amp is actually compressing the incoming signal – this has the effect of making the softer parts of the signal louder. So what you are hearing are the low-level repeats that normally fall below the level of audibility when used with clean settings.
One option is to turn down the delay level until the repeats sound right with the distorted tone – but at that point, they’ll likely be too quiet with your clean sound. A second option is to use two delay pedals, or a single pedal that can store presets. This would let you have one delay set up for clean tones, and another set up for dirty tones.
The best option is to place the delay in your amp’s effects loop (assuming it has one). This places the delay after the distortion stage of the amp; the delay levels should now stay the same for both your clean and dirty sounds.
You can accomplish much the same thing by using an overdrive or distortion pedal for your dirty sound while keeping your amp clean. (The routing would be guitar to dirty pedal to delay to clean amp.)