Diethelm's delay

[matthias@bahianet.com.br (Matthias Grob)]

Thomas Dielhelm is a nylon guitar player that made some success in Europe,
about 10 years ago using a particular kind of "looping"

He was rather of the individual kind, had his own strong style (literaly,
he was a champion in spear throwing, before dedicating to the guitar!),
virtuoso as long as playing his own compositions and using his AMS pitch
shifter (to be fair: the first record he made without it).
His main technique was to set up a pattern of delayed pitch transpositions.
So each note he played turned into a short melody of 2 to 6 notes. For each
song, he used specific patterns and composed using the delayed transposed
notes.
This may sounds trivial, but once you listen to his records (about 6 of
them, "valys in my head" I would recommend most) you get impressed how far
he went with this technique.
Often he quickly alternated between chords and melody playing and with the
delay of each, chords and melody were constantely present and due to the
pitch shift, there was no impression of repetition. The limitation of this
technique made him creative in terms of composition and gave his own sound.
Two of the records he made in team with one of the best swiss keyboarders
called Famulari, the others feature a good band.

He used to have a lot of trouble with the expensive and sensible AMS studio
machine that used to fail before important concerts and since he completely
depended on it, this might even have considerabely contributed to the end
of his career.
As far as I know he sells dried spiced fish now (he is a brilliant cook, 
too).


Anyway: Today he could use a PCM80 for this purpose, I think.
With the pitch card to it you can set up to 4 voices with individual pitch,
delay, pan and feedback. Since the delay can be controlled as a rate of an
incoming MIDIclock or Tap key, it is a lot more flexible than the AMS was,
and the melody pattern can be synced to a looper.

There must be other effect units doing a similar job.


There is a question to Greg:

The memory of the PCM80 is expandable to about 40 seconds, but only for
some of the algorithms. (Why?)
I cannot find the information for the pitch algorithms, or is none of them
extendable beyond 1.2 seconds?