Seymour Duncan Vapor Trail Analog Delay Pedal Reviews

First of all I'd like thank my sales fella, TY. He has always helped for several years now.

I like how simple this pedal is. I have had the strymon dig, and the el capos tan on my board. I like the strymon pedals but I guess I get overwhelmed with them.

Thanks SW! I look forward to doing business in the very near future!

This is a high class BBD analog delay. I owned the MXR Carbon Copy Delay, not bad but very standard for my taste. On the other hand, this Vapor Trail from Seymour Duncan is a huge machine. Very warm sound with personality and versatile controls. Mix, repeats and delay controls are the same as other delays but the dynamic and response of them are very different from its competitors. It allows you to be more creative with the addition of the rate and depth modulation controls. It also has an external output to connect another pedal such as chorus, tremolo, wah wah, overdrive, etc. to add this signal to the delay repetitions. Also, zero noise and true bypass. Thanks to my senior sales engineer's Alden Debee for the recommendation!

I'm not going to get into all the technical aspects of this pedal,because I can't.It's the first delay I've ever owned and I'm not that savvy about equipment.I bought it based on reviews and the Don Carr demo video.I will say this,within 2 minutes of turning knobs on this thing through my Champion 40,I had a smile on my face.Props to Ethan Myers for getting anything I order to me in 2 days.

Use this pedal with compression pedal run to a Fender Hot rod deluxe. Works well with all my guitars. I don't play without it

I've had many Delays, and always looked for that hendrix style trail , especially Red House, in my tone, and have to say, this nailed it

I use this pedal combined with a compression pedal for my acoustic rig. The reviews are correct this pedal brings each note to the front, love it.

First and foremost, the old school feel, pick attack control with your BB (bucket brigade) analog delay can't be beat; there isn't an analog setting on a digital delay can do it!!! Hat's off to Seymour Duncan on this pedal but especially for bringing a bright edge to this type of delay (modulation side of this pedal is sparkling goodness). The original signal is crystal and the repeats (depth/amount of repeat depending) go from clean to broken up, mad cool. Surprisingly extremely versatile for the amount of delay time, and because it's a true analog delay your leads are on top and sounding so sweet sustaining notes and slower riffs, regardless of time setting. Just wow!!! Hats off and thank you to Bob Mondock and the Sweetwater team for doing their thing and getting this out the door and to me once it became available!!!

I am quite pleased with the Vapor Trail Analog Delay. The insert jack just makes sense. So far, inserting a nice cranked fuzz takes this pedal over the top for me. The modulation is creamy with a very musical range. This delay pedal makes playing the guitar more fun. I can see purchasing another one to play with my synths or using both as a stereo delay.

Thank you Tim Harrington for over a decade of professionalism, excellent service and great conversations. I buy musical gear from Sweetwater because of Tim.

So, a pickup company decides to enter the pedal game. Sure, I can see that. Then they introduce an analog delay with features out the wazoo at an affordable price. I'm an analog delay fan from way back and the only pedal I deemed worth of my board was the MXR Carbon Copy. Simply put, it got replaced by the Vapor Trail. I think most everything's been covered in the other reviews, but hearing is indeed believing. Pick this pedal up, you'll be doing yourself a huge favor.

Can't wait to try more SD pedals in the future.

I told my sales associate what I was looking for and he suggested I concider the Vapor Trail. It was very good advice. I tried the MXR and a couple others prebiously, but the Seymour Duncan is quiet and smooth in comparison. It has feature I've not explored yet but I'm looking forward to experimenting.

This pedal is fantastic. I love everything about it, the design is very attractive, the build feels superb, and the sound is nothing short of heavenly. This is the second Seymour Duncan product that I have purchased (the first was a JB Jr.) and both have lived up to SD's reputation for great products with just flawless attention to detail.

While it really doesn't make any difference in tone, let's be honest, looks matter; and this pedal looks SHARP. The combination of the blue lights' color matching perfectly with the very well-done graphics and the very cool aluminum looking outer casing make for a pedal that will definitely add some style to your board.

The delays are warm, harmonically rich, with a very pleasant decay as they repeat and combined with the modulation circuit they produce a wonderful blooming, full sound that can even make a tiny 1x8 Fender mustang sound like an amp two or three times the power and size. The warmth provided by this pedal really helps when dealing with solid state amps that tend to be very brittle sounding and really helps modeling amps to sound much much closer to tubes. I have not really liked delay pedals before (particularly digital ones) because to me they sounded just like a stuck record with a very sterile and flat tone to them. The Vapor Trail sounds much less like a broken record and more like a real echo as if your amp was in a cave. This sounds (at least to me) much more pleasing to the ear and really puts new life into any kind of tone you may be working with.

The controls are intuitive, feel great and strike the perfect balance between range of effect and sensitivity. If I had one wish for this pedal I wish there were a dedicated on/off switch for the modulation, but turning down the rate and depth gets pretty much the same thing so it's not a very big complaint.

To low-budget pedal buyers like me this may seem like a lot of money, but by analog delay standards this is actually very reasonably priced (especially for ones made in the US) and considering what you are getting it is a very good deal.

Seriously, this pedal is definitely worth a try no matter what kind of music you play. Give it a shot, you won't be disappointed.

Great service and a fantastic delay pedal, very lush and musical.

Very silky, & sexy. Sound is deep but clean.

Lots of bells and whistles but when it comes down to it this is great for a set it and forget it performance delay as well.

I especially like that it lights up and strobes the timing of the delay. Great for dark stages.

TWO THUMBS UP SEYMOUR DUNCAN!!

This is soooooo smooth. The analog Bucket Brigade decays with such a smooth natural roll off it blows any digital imitation I have heard. Sometimes backwards is good like tube amps. If you like the sound of analog this is the unit to get. The built in modulation can add a touch of richness t the delay if used discreetly. I am a fan of True Bypass as I worked hard to get the sound out of my guitar that I was looking and when I don't want the delay on I don't want any of its' circuitry influencing my guitar. This avoids the loss of those nice high harmonic bell tones I took so much effort to bring out in my guitar. This unit is definitely a home run boys. I would recommend it to anyone.

Great pedal does exactly what I wanted , very happy !

Never purchased any item there that I was pressured into buying. Always been advised of the pros and cons of the item and if I were to ask I would be informed of another item that would better fit my needs. Once I bought a Avid Rack Eleven and found it was a piece of equipment that was far beyond my experience level and I was refunded the purchase price with no problem what-so-ever! That's awesome. Fast shipping, quality service with knowledgeable staff, can't beat it in my book.

Seymour Duncan got this pedal right. REALLY RIGHT!

Let me start by saying that I am a massive tone snob who has been through countless analog delays in search of the perfect combination of tone and features. I've tried (and used for many years) the biggest names in analog delay. I had the EHX flagship Deluxe Memory Man on my board for quite some time. I have also played through the diminutive (and widely panned, but really not that bad at all) Memory Toy. I've gone through the seriously overrated (but still quite good) MXR Carbon Copy, Malekko Ekko 616, Maxon/Ibanez AD9, Way Huge Supa Puss, Way Huge Echo Puss, and I even dabbled in digital delay with a Flashback X4 (which is a good multi-purpose delay, but the analog mode does NOT sound like a true analog delay). To make a long story short - I had some kind of issue with ALL of the above that caused me to keep searching for the RIGHT delay for ME. The DMM sounded great, but when use in an effects loop, it's always a battle between the "gain" knob and the "blend" knob to get the level right. The Supa Puss also sounded good, but it had a horrible volume drop when used in an effects loop. The Carbon Copy's repeats sounded good, but it changed my dry sound too much when engaged. The Malekko was pretty close to what I wanted, but the repeats were a bit too gritty when played over a clean tone (sounded great for leads, though).

The SD Vapor Trail has NONE of those issues. Zero volume drop. Zero impact on dry signal. Sounds awesome on both clean and overdriven tones. Repeats don't get overly Lo-Fi at the maximum delay setting (like they do on a DMM) - they just get a bit darker. The tone of the repeats is very warm and clean. It's definitely darker than my Deluxe Memory Man - but much cleaner than my Deluxe Memory Boy. No fuzziness on the repeats (but you can make them that way if you use the built-in effects loop feature). The "mix" knob functions EXACTLY like it should. You can easily dial in just a subtle amount of delay, all the way up to repeats that are louder than the dry signal. I cannot overstate just how important the mix knob is to the usability of a pedal...and SO MANY manufacturers get it terribly wrong. On this pedal (as it should on ALL pedals, IMHO) the mix knob controls the volume of the repeats ONLY with ZERO impact on the volume or tone of your dry signal (unlike EHX delays). Thank you, Seymour Duncan! FINALLY somebody got that right! Having the modulation controls on top of the unit is also great, and the modulation in this unit sounds quite good, indeed. The "delay" knob houses a blinking LED that pulses to the tempo of the delay. This is handy in a live situation so you can see the tempo before engaging the effect.

All of that adds up to one hell of an analog delay pedal. It's quite obvious that Seymour Duncan really did their homework when they designed this thing. The Vapor Trail is hands-down the best compact (and for my purposes, the best overall) analog delay on the market today. It's absolutely fantastic.

Very responsive and easy to adjust. I can make it sound exactly as good as the demo video! The bucket brigade sounds are spectacular .

I've always loved SD pickups, so I decide to trust them and purchase this pedal. It is one of the best sounding delay pedals I've ever hear. Not so expensive, pure analog, nice features and SD quality.

What do you expect, it is a SD!!!

I wanted an analog delay, but there are tons of them....so got some opinions/advice from my PSE, Reid Bright, who highly recommended the Vapor Trail..Unfortunately, there was an issue with the first one,but, I could hear the potential, so had them send another...and it's a winner for sure.

I like that it has the modulation controls on the outside of the pedal, so you don't need to take it apart to play with the settings (and I constantly tweak...so this was a nice touch.

Also, there's a side insert so you can plug in whatever other effects you want, to ONLY effect the repeats... I wasn't sure I'd really use that...but it's actually pretty cool...you can do all kinds of "weird" stuff to your repeats while keeping the original signal clean.

The only reason I'm knocking half a star is the fact I had to send the first one back, and I'm not always fond of the constantly blinking tempo light (can be annoying but, it does serve a purpose)... I should add that Sweetwater's return/exchange policy was excellent as usual.

I'll echo (pun intended) the reviewers here than mention the warmth of the repeats, and also the 18v feature. What doesn't seem to get mentioned here is the FX loop on this pedal. That's right, with a TRS cable you can send the repeats through other pedals. Preamp, overdrive, pitch, chorus, reverb, whatever you want. It's delicious. For instance, I can run my EQD Afterneath in the loop of the Vapor Trail to create cavernous and haunting repeats. The is really cool when I set the Afterneath at extreme settings because I can us the mix control on the Vapor Trail to keep my original signal very present AND the Afterneath loud enough to hear the detail. I also love my Shallow Water in the loop with an overdrive to mimic tape like nastiness.

I knocked off half of a star because I wish it had a tone control. Sometimes I like to roll back a touch of the highs. But at this price point, the Vapor Trail kills it.

Excels at doing everything I want an analog delay to do and then some. Being able to see the delay time via blinking LED is incredibly useful. the only reason I'm not giving the full 5 is after playing with the two modulation controls a while I realized they don't really do all that much. I passed on a Malekko 616 because the modulation controls did too much. I'll happily settle for subtlety, though. The stereo/fx loop jack seems cool but I haven't really gotten to play with it that much. My only other wish is that the in/out jacks weren't on the top.

Really love the sound of this pedal. If it had a tap, would be perfect. However, with a digital brain controlling analog chips, it think something happens with a normal 9v power supply that starves the process and allows a lot of clipping - where you end up with very dirty repeats - especially with hotter pickups or playing with a boost like the Tone Job or RYRA Klone.

Anyway. Got a Dunlap 18v power supply yesterday, rushed home, plugged it in: problem fixed. Beautiful lush tones without the clipping/dirty repeats.

This pedal allows me really add some great elays to my sound.

If you're looking for a good Delay Pedal, then you'll be happy with this one. However, I do use a Roland EV5 Pedal to create the wet mix. The two pedals compliment each other very well. Disengage the EV5 Pedal (toe up) and you have a very dry mix that doesn't have the "intensity" of the wet mix. But, placing the two pedals together will give you that "Vapor Trail" effect.

I have used many delay pedals in my 30+ years of gigging. I'm a pedal minimalist, so when I purchase a pedal I look for great sound, ease of use, and stage friendliness. The Vapor Trail seemed to fit that bill and the reviews convinced me to buy it.

Physical Features:
I love the small size and easy to use controls. I don't need to have settings for BPM, milliseconds or quarter/eighth notes. I appreciate tap tempo (which the Vapor Trail doesn't have), BUT...the flashing LED is awesome. It's so easy to visually set it to the drummer's tempo if I'm really concerned about being perfect. I also love that the input/output and power supply jacks are on the front. For me it makes it easier to fit on my pedal board. I will probably never use the insert jack on the side.

Sound Quality
I'm not one of those experimental guitarists that go for freaky sound effects; I want a simple delay that fattens up my solos and can be used for a few other things. I don't care much for the rate or depth controls, but I can see how some guitarists will utilize them. When I plugged this pedal into my rig for the first time I was taken aback at how natural the delays sound on my clean channel. The delays just "fit" and didn't pull my ear. In fact, when I bypassed the delay the amp sounded dull and lifeless.

I'm currently running the delay between my guitar and amp as the last effect in my chain. I'm doing this because my amp effects loop has some noise issues that I need to get repaired. I did try the pedal in my effects loop as well as before the amp and it sounded exactly the same. One thing I'm not crazy about is that with distortion engaged, the distorted delays don't sound as natural. They have a bit of a phase tone to them. This happened whether I was running the pedal before my amp or in the loop. However, during my live performance it wasn't bothersome. Heck, this is one of the only delay pedals I've ever used that I could leave it on and it didn't cause a bunch of delay mayhem with the song. Like I said earlier...the sound of this pedal "just fits".

I love it.

Bought this to replace my Boss DD3 delay. I like it better because the Vapor Trail does not affect the guitar tone like the Boss does when off (true bypass), and the delay sounds is more natural. The modulation effect is subtle but I like it that way. Overall very satisfied.

Does job. Great and depth with all controls.
Love the extra exterior knobs adjustments. Sounds great. Makes me happy.

A great analog delay pedal.
Easy to set your desired sound.
No digital processing noise.
Plays well w/ others.
Sweet metallic w/clear coat finish.
Warm fluid clear repeats.
Sounds very good.
My style: blues rock....hard rock....rockabilly.... Jazzy cleans....funk.
Priced a lttle more but boutique tone's.