Delay pedals come in all sorts of flavours – retro, modern, analog, digital – but sometimes you want a little bit of digital-style control over an analog-style tone, and this is where a lot of delay pedals fall flat. The true analog stuff is too unruly for the kind of fine control that digital can give you, while the digital stuff usually sounds too polite to really pass for analog. What to do, what to do? Well, the Cusack Tap-A-Delay might just have a solution for you.
This purple and green pedal offers up to 750ms of delay time. It features dials for level, mix, feedback, delay and an eight position modulation rotary control, while there are two three-position mini-toggle switches (Mode and Divide), two momentary-style footswitches (Tap Speed and Bypass) and two LEDs (Tempo and Status). You can connect other devices that accept an external tap control for other Cusack devices – it works as either an out or in, so somebody else can tap your delay – for example, maybe your drummer can keep a tap switch close by so they can deftly adjust the tempo of your delay. Or you can control the tap tempo of your singer’s own delay unit. Cool!
Buy the Cusack Tap-A-Delay Pedal from Guitar Center.
The Divide switch allows you to subdivide the tap rate between eighth note, dotted eighth note and quarter note settings, while the Mode setting interacts with the Tap Speed footswitch for what Cusack calls Braking – this causes the pedals delay time to increase or decrease depending on where you set the mode switch, and it can create some truly trippy sounds.
The modulation options include zero modulation in position one, then gradually increasing moduation between positions 2 and 6. Position 7 increases the delay on a virtual tape, making the repeats increase in both pitch and tempo, while position 8 does the opposite. Once either reaches its maximum or minimum delay speed, it snaps back to the start of the cycle, which is a really cool effect that adds a bit of a random vibe to your music. So there’s plenty of warm, random, analog-feeling sound to be explored here, yet with a wealth of tap control options and modulation settings that take it far beyond what a regular analog delay pedal can do.
It’s a bit of a bummer that the Tap-A-Delay is mono, since ping-ponging stereo outputs would be an absolute riot with this pedal, but the sheer number of usable sounds, both controllable and chaotic, makes such concerns vanish into the shimmering distance just like the delay repeats. It’s a musical, fun and expressive pedal that doesn’t always clue you into what it’s going to do next, but that’s part of what makes it so much fun to use. This is really a delay pedal that plays you just as much as you play it.
Link: Cusack
