MXR CARBON COPY DELAY M169

I tested this guy on a real gig just this evening on my church and I have tons of things to say but I'll keep it as short as possible. Enjoy my review :)

Another delay pedal?

Yes. To be more exact: another true analog delay pedal with true bypass. Remember my Electro Harmonix Memory Boy review last month? Well, this is actually kind of similar like that.

This thing packs lots of features in a relatively small foot print. It's very easy to use and it has the same size as your nano-sized EHX pedals. The regen knob is for the feedback time, mix is for dry vs wet and of course delay knob is for the delay time. It has a modulation switch that turns on chorus-like effect on the repeats to emulate the famous tape echo effect. This thing is not 100% true bypass by the way, it has what they call a hard-wired bypass. I don't know what it is, but this doesn't seem to suck a very significant amount of tone so it's still better compared to a Boss or Ibanez pedal.

So what sets this thing apart from other analog delay pedals?

The delay time can reach a maximum time of around 600ms, that's long enough for me. The warmth of the repeats also has some unique characteristics that doesn't appear in any other pedal. It's hard to describe what I heard from this pedal, but trust me, this thing is good.

So far so good...

Please note, however, that this pedal is a very straight forward delay pedal. It will do basic analog delay functions, it doesn't do fancy stuffs, it doesn't have expression pedal output, it doesn't have stereo capability, no multi output, no fancy switching.

I personally use this pedal together for long-delay sound around 500ms. It works well combined with other delay pedals and it's quiet enough so that it doesn't create noises or anything. I switch to this pedal mostly during lead guitar parts and it does a great job on getting the repeats to blend together with the notes as long as you set the knobs carefully.

The obvious: is it worth?

Absolutely! Well, it's a bit pricier than a Memory Boy frankly speaking, but still, for this kind of price you get something very good. It sounds just nice, works very well as an analog delay pedal. You can get this pedal for around $140.00 more or less.

From 0 to 10?

I'll give this pedal a 9.5! Could be better if it's cheaper of course, and also I haven't really tweak the internal trim pots for modulation range and depth. I'll get back with more info once I tweak those pots!

Sound clip: click HERE --> dry, wet no modulation, wet with modulation, combined with Memory Boy and Holy Grail Reverb. I used a tube screamer on all sounds to add a bit of top end chunk.

Update: The internal trim pots for the width and speed of the modulation doesn't really change the sound that much since as you can hear on my sound clip that the modulation is too narrow and hard to hear. Nonetheless, without the modulation it already sounds great. Still 9.5....

Cheers and God bless :)

p.s: I will post a discussion about Memory Boy vs Carbon Copy soon