CUSACK TAP-A-DELAY EFFECTS PEDAL

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. 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, but the sheer num­ber of usable sounds, both con­trol­lable and chaotic, makes such con­cerns van­ish into the 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. This is really a delay pedal that plays you just as much as you play it.