Imagine a time before the delay pedal. An era when guitarists couldn’t conjure slapbacks or ping-pongs at the click of a footswitch. To anyone who came up during BOSS’s half-century reign, the notion is unthinkable. After all, with today’s range offering everything from next-gen trailblazers like the DD-500 to modern takes on classic units like the Space Echo, Delay Machine, DM-2, DD-3 and SDE-3000, fans of this vital effect have never had such mindblowing tools under their boots.
But delay wasn’t always so accessible or user-friendly.
When the original tape echo effect first pricked up ears in the 1940s, it was the preserve of professionals players in top recording studios, and created using bulky mechanical reel-to-reel machines notorious for their expense and impracticality.
Still, for the select few with access to the technology, astonishing sounds were possible. In subsequent years, a run of tape-based delay units rose and fell, from the Echoplex to the Watkins Copicat. But arguably the first to achieve global use was 1974’s RE-201 Space Echo, developed by BOSS’s sister company Roland. Outgoing president Yoshihiro Ikegami started his long career at Roland assembling these units – and
