Re: "Tape Speed" style pitch/speed variation

[Daryl Shawn <highhorse@mhorse.com>]

Title:

Definitely one of my favorite things about using tape, or the old DDL's. The great thing about the old Digitech PDS-2000 and PDS-8000 pedals (and I assume the rackmount versions) is that, if an echo is captured at one extreme end of the delay time knob, twisting it to the extreme in the other direction will yield a perfect smooth two-octave jump, with all the fun microtones in between.

The one thing I wish that worked was for the "delay range" toggle to hold the echo in memory, so that a one-motion jump was also possible by switching between the ranges, but such was not to be.

Bill Frisell and Nels Cline are great illustrators of using and abusing the loop speed/pitch "feature" of older DDL's.

Daryl

When I gave up my modified reel to reel and began looping using a DDL, I really liked having a knob to control the loop speed... then as the 1980s wore on nearly every DDL used paged memory to control delay times and sample rates were fixed. How joyless!  I cannot properly relate how intuitive it is to use a knob to control the pitch of a loop. I hope that more manufacturers will get back to this level of live manipulation and control.