I'm a bit out of guitar 'culture' these days, but I recall a tendency to prize things that are old (or 'vintage'). In some cases this is warranted (like guitars from the 1950s and 1960s), but in others it really isn't. I think older digital delay pedals in particular are a strange thing to prize, because they are computers. Like any computer they have just got more powerful, with more features, and (relatively) cheaper over time.
Still, there's something to be said for good design, and I'm really fond of the Yamaha DDS-20M.
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| I have two, like a normal person |
When I bought these second-hand I think they would have been about 10 years old and around £50. When they were first released they would have been a fairly 'high-end' unit for the time - with the ability to get around 2 seconds of delay and also to sample a 2 second passage and that will loop indefinitely. The loop is retained too, unlike similar pedals of the time like the Boss DD3 where you can capture a phrase but it disappears once you take your foot off the pedal. By comparison, you could get a pedal that can record 30 minutes of your guitar playing for £50 nowadays. But at the time in the 1990s or whatever, 2 seconds WHOA HOLD ON WE ARE GOING TO SPACE.
The unit also has 3 modes to select time ranges (short / medium / long) and it's solidly built with a metal case. These were made in Japan, which suggests a certain degree of quality components, materials, and high quality control too.
I started playing guitar when I was 14, but it was many years before I got a delay pedal because they were always too expensive. Now they are my favourite creative tool. If I was starting playing again, I'd want to have a fairly basic delay pedal for practice because it can really help with your timing. Also delay pedals are a great crutch if you are not very good at playing guitar. You can make yourself sound like you are playing more than you actually are, you can cover up your sloppy chops in a big wall of echo, and if you can sample a phrase then you can stop playing altogether and have a rest or do a "look no hands!" magic trick that will drive audiences wild.
This pedal reminds me of a particular time (2007), and a bit of a watershed in my playing and writing. I wrote a part of a song that featured a cascading, delayed phrase that I then sampled the end of by crouching down and turning a knob to the right. The sampled phrase was in time with the drums (or, the drums played in time to the phrase) and I had my hands free to clap or play a wood block. I do this kind of thing all the time now. I am a very lazy guitarist. Back then, people couldn't work out how I was doing it, which I got a kick out of.
The point was that this unit is intuitive and responsive enough to be easy to try things out in the moment, rather than having to read a manual beforehand. You can also use it to make flying saucer noises.
With the memory of making that song, the Yamaha DDS-20M is also strongly linked to a place. We were rehearsing in a really nice professional studio complex near Old Street in London. It was too good for us. It was the second place we'd been resident in, after the first one (in Holloway Road) closed down because the land was sold for property development.
The place in Old Street suited us, although it was at the limit of our collective budget. The main memory from there was the day that the singer told us he would be leaving the band. I distinctly remember the sudden sinking feeling in my gut, because the news was a complete surprise. Then I remember him leaving rehearsal, and the rest of us quickly resolving to carry on playing together but as a new band, with new songs. There was definitely an immediate reaction to 'keep going'. I don't remember talking about it with the singer much at the time, and I regret that a bit. Not to persuade him to stay because he was definitively leaving, but just to talk about it more than we did.
We had to move out of that rehearsal space before too long, as the rates went up twice within a year and it became impossibly expensive. We've been fairly lucky with rehearsal spaces since, but I assume it's much harder to rehearse in London than it used to be, let alone run a rehearsal studio business.
Both of my Yamaha DDS-20M pedals are slightly faulty now, but they've had plenty of use. They are fairly basic by today's standards, but well made and its various features and settings complement each other really well. Most importantly, this unit opened up a new avenue in my playing that I've got a great deal out of since.
