coveted bucket brigade chips, instead
of the lazy “analog” blanket setting.
Do you have a horde of vintage analog
delay pedals that you referenced? Is
this a sonic or circuit type of
modeling? Are these algorithms
tweaked by the gears, ears, or a
bit of both?
MF: Oh, man… I love analog delay units,
so I wanted to create something that
would let you really hear the differences
in sound between the various BBD
(Bucket Brigade Delay) chips. I started
off by really listening to every analog
delay in the shop (we have seven right
now). Once I picked the three that I
wanted to represent, I did a lot of
measurement to accurately recreate
their filtering and frequency response
curves. This involved feeding sweeps
into their inputs and then plotting their
output response—my digital
oscilloscope got quite a workout on that
project! Then I had to mimic the selfoscillation and distortion character of
the BBD chips, which was tough. If you
have too much signal going into DSP you
can over-range its registers—basically
you run out of numbers and it just shuts
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INTERVIEW //
down. To compensate for that, I had to
come up with a way to keep the
oscillation under the threshold but still
get that great spaceship sound.
TRW: On the other end of the repeat
spectrum, we have your brazenly
beautiful Radical Delay. There is so
much going on in this little stomper.
How did you manage to cram pristine
delays, comprehensive chorusing,
ringmod robo-speak and cascading
octave descent and ascension into one
box without menu diving? Also, was
the glitch setting a happy accident
that you ran with, or planned from
the beginning?
MF: Each mode on the pedal is really a
completely separate delay algorithm.
They all share the basic “bones” of the
900-millisecond digital delay with
feedback, but that Tweak knob is
different for each. I mentioned before
that I can use one control for several
parameters, and that’s what’s happening
here. In Bend mode, the Tweak controls
the pitch shift amount, so it’s zero in the
middle and up or down an octave at the
ends. Glitch mode was developed first,
because I wanted a low bit-rate digital
Family Over Everything: Matthew Farrow of Alexander Pedals