The Steel Guitar Forum

I asked Santa (My Wife actually) for a Boss DD3 and a Holy Grail reverb for Christmas this year.

I got both and also a lot of other stuff too.
I have heard these pedals praised here on the forum, in the past, so that is why I wanted to try them.

My question is What are your favorite settings on the DD3? The holy grail is easy to set and leave on.

Do you use it as an echo effect only on certain songs?
Or do you suggest I leave it on a subtle setting all the time?

Now it seems like I wish I had two or more DD3's to use a long delay or short echo depending on the song. But I don't want to bend down to the floor and fiddle with it between songs...

Oh the humanity!

Dom

I have a DD3 as well as several other delay pedals and my advice is to just start messing with it to get a feel for it. In my case I use several delays when I play and each one varies depending on whether I'm playing with a band or alone and what song I'm playing. For that reason I won't give an exact setting but rather a general idea.

If you're like most people you'll have a tendancy to over use the effect so give a good listen to others music. IMO, it's best to use it as a subtle effect to give depth and the delay rate most times will be set in lock-step with the tempo of the song.

My favorite setting, once I get the the tempo set, is to set the number of repeats so that I can only hear 1 or 2 repeats and then quickly trail off. I set the volume of the first repeat lower that the note being played and that's basically it. That to me is the most versitile setting and what I would advise as a starting point.

I started out with one delay on my pedalboard and would readjust on the fly, then I added a second so that I could quickly switch between two settings. Then I started using a rack unit with midi pedalboard for unlimited presets but missed being able to easily adjust my settings on the fly, so I canned that and went back to floor effects. Now I use a Boss DD-20 which gives me the best of both worlds.

If you can live with one setting or don't mind changing on the fly the DD3 is a great pedal.

Have fun, I hope this helped.

Thanks,
That is what I figured. For Recording I always match the tempo exactly, but when I play live I am going to have to live with a simple generic setting, that will work for all songs.

Dom Franco

Yep, if you set your delay the way I described no one will notice that the tempo isn't in lock-step. If you have a metranome set it to 80 bpm and adjust the delay to that and that should give you a good starting point.

The DD-3 is a great pedal, but personally I use a Line 6 DL-4. It has three programmable presets and a tap tempo switch, plus some looping capability.