Digital Delay, Guitar Effects → Digital Delay – Why Does The Edge’s Guitar Have an Echo?
U2 is undoubtedly one of the most popular rock and roll bands of recent times and has many hit songs that are played often on the radio. If you listen closely to the guitar player who calls himself The Edge, you will hear something strange going on – a sort of echo in the sound coming out of his guitar. What is that?
Digital Delay
Your ears are not deceiving you. The guitar really does have an echo. The echo is produced by a guitar effect called a “Digital Delay”. (A guitar effect is simply any device that modifies the sound of an electric guitar). The echo occurs because the digital delay internally records the last couple of seconds of what has just been played, and waits (or delays) a short amount of time before playing back the couple of seconds it has just recorded. For example, you play tra-la-la on a guitar hooked up to a digital delay. What you will hear coming out of the amplifier is tra-la-la, tra-la-la, tra-la-la.
Two Main Settings
There are two main settings that you can control on a digital delay. The first setting determines how fast the echo occurs. This is called the delay time. The more delay time there is, the more time there is in between each echo. Delay time is usually specified in increments of milliseconds. There are 1000 milliseconds in 1 second. This means that if you set the delay time to 1000 milliseconds, you would hear a repeating echo in the guitar sound every second.
The second setting determines how many times the echo will repeat itself. This number can be anywhere between 1 and infinity. A setting of two would cause two echoes to occur after the guitar is played just like in the example earlier. Suppose you play tra-la-la on a guitar hooked up to a digital delay with a repeat setting of two. What you will hear coming out of the amplifier is tra-la-la, tra-la-la, tra-la-la. This is the original sound tra-la-la followed by two echoes of tra-la-la, tra-la-la. If the number of echoes is set to infinity, the echoes will continue to repeat over and over until the digital delay is turned off.
Rack or Pedal
Digital delay effect units come in many shapes and sizes. You can purchase a rack mounted unit with lots of controls or you can go with the more traditional guitar pedal digital delay. Most guitar players like to use pedals because they have more control over the effect when playing live. You step on the pedal once to turn the delay on and you step on it again to turn the delay off. That way you can change the guitar from a “clean” uneffected sound to a delay sound during a single song.
Why Use Digital Delay?
Why would you want to use a digital delay on electric guitars? For starters, having a slight echo on the guitar makes it sound much fuller. It almost sounds as if multiple guitars are playing instead of just one. For solos and guitar parts with lots of notes, digital delay can make the part sound much more complex. The delayed notes mix together with the undelayed notes to form rich complex passages that cannot be achieved with a clean uneffected guitar.
Popular U2 Songs With Delay Times
Here are some of the most popular U2 songs and some approximate digital delay times in milliseconds:
Electric Co (275ms)
A Sort of Homecoming (375ms)
Bad (467ms)
Where the Streets Have No Name (350ms)
I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For (450ms)
With or Without You (410ms)