MAD PROFESSOR - DEEP BLUE DELAY - OWNER’S MANUAL
Thank you for buying
the DEEP BLUE DELAY!
DEEP BLUE DELAY is a natural sounding
digital/analog delay, with analog direct
signal path.
• The Deep Blue Delay has about the same band-
width as the classic tape echo units, and it can
be used in front of an amplifi er or in amplifi er
effects loops.
• There are no noise reduction circuits, which
keeps decay of echo as natural as possible.
• The direct signal path is short and made with
analog amplifi ers with no fi ltering.
• There should be no distortion or tone coloration
as long as input level is in range below maximum
allowed.
• The echo signal has a tuned fi ltering to allow
extreme settings without interference.
The delay is specially designed to work well with
distorted tone, as this is the most critical applica-
tion, where delays often fail.
You can use the pedal before or after distortion.
As such, it will work exceptionally well on clean
sounds where requirements are less stringent,
especially in terms of echo bandwidth and repeat
formation.
The delay tone has been carefully tuned with lot of
attention to the fi rst critical refl ection and how the
repeats decay.
Deep Blue Delay is kept small (69 mm x 111 mm x
50 mm including jacks and knobs) containing just
the basic delay features; Delay Time, Delay level and
Repeat controls. It was designed to work as an ambi-
ence delay; like that of a vintage tape echo and the
repeat formation was specifi cally designed to allow
easy setting and less critical setting of delay time.
With delay times higher than 120ms, the delay time
is sometimes set on the beat or on a multiple of the
beat. Deep Blue handles this by not giving full range
repeats, but a tuned response that don’t need to be
on the beat to sound good.
wHY DIGITAL? ISN’T ANALOG BETTER
FOR A SOLID-STATE SOLuTION?
Well, in many ways, the delay medium is less critical
and it could be an oil-drum, tape, metal-thread,
analog BBD or digital, but the fi nal sound is always
set by the limitations of the delay medium and the
peripheral circuitry needed to make either work.
We chose digital construction to make it compact,
stable, with reasonable delay time and virtually
service free, where the limitations of the circuit
would be less critical. As an outcome, you can
set the peripheral circuitry with desired band-
width and distortion levels with less consider-
ation on the exact limits of the delay medium,
while of course always pushing the limits, as with
anything musical.
A similar circuit in analog form would be exces-
sively more expensive to make. For the same
performance, it would require three to four of the
best BBD chips now only available as vintage
parts and the size of the pedal would have to be
about three times the current size.
The controls are:
• LEVEL
, sets the level of delayed signal mixed
with straight guitar tone, fully CCW there is
only straight (un-effected) guitar signal heard
and fully CW gives the loudest delay.
• DELAY
, controls the delay time from 25 ms
(fully CCW) to 450 ms (fully CW).
• REPEAT
, controls the repeats of the delay
signal, fully CCW gives one repeat and at fully
CW you get infi nite feedback.
