Hello Gary, Hello Gary, Hello Gary, Hello Gary, Hello Gary, Ken is following this thread, so he kindly forwarded the following - thank goodness we can get him out of his garage laboratory to drink beer and play music once in awhile.
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We're using a Boss (Roland) RV-3 guitar delay pedal of all things. It
really has a very clean sound and good delay & reverb functions and of
course a nice compact package. It's obsolete but the successor, RV-5,
looks similar and probably is quite comparable. I run it with a single
repeat echo at my best guess of 115ms delay (seems like I read that was the
magic number back in the day, probably based on tape-loop head spacing &
tape speed). It sits in the aux loop so I can dial varying amounts on
different channels. If you refer to the photo, I set Balance to EFX,
Tone/FBACK full CCW (to get just the one repeat), RTIME/DTIME to about 8
o'clock (to set the delay time), and MODE to 2 (short delay, no reverb).
The "cleanliness" of the sound is typically what people regard as
"sterile". The RV-3 has a 1K resistor in series with its output which
means you can just hang a 0.047uF capacitor on it (cleverly hidden inside
the 1/4" plug barrel, soldered across the terminals) to cut the treble
noticibly. It gives a bit of character to it and the part I like best
(which Slack alluded to in a previous post) is that it "hides" the echo
effectively by suppressing much of the definition of the sound in the echo.
If the echo has equal HF content to the dry signal it's easy for them to
clash IMO. When I reconfigured our sound system I put new cables in this
loop, forgetting about this capacitor mod. That's partly why the echo on
the demos sounds obtrusive. (That, and the fact that there's too much in
places anyway).
Another step that can be taken is to insert a tube or FET-based emulating
preamp or buffer in the signal path to generate that "musical distortion"
sound that tubes are prized for. This is the source of much of the
"warmth" people associate with tube equipment. This is one of the elements
of the "aural exciter" effects and compressor "enhancer" features that are
supposed to add "sheen" or "air" to the sound without making it "brittle"
or "harsh". (the multitude of "" in this description should indicate just
how subjective these qualities are).
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Gary, I'll look at my settings, or snap a photo of my RE-20 later this evening.
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