For years, I’ve mentally battled with the Boss DD-3 and Boss DD-7 pedals. I’m talking about a mental battle. I’ve had the Boss DD-3 Digital Delay on my board for years. It’s a great sounding digital delay, but for some reason – I always felt compelled to replace it. I would get other more expensive pedals in it’s place, but eventually, that Boss DD-3 would end up back on there. Until, one day, I realized – this pedal is exactly what I needed, and I quit looking.
For a lot of players out there, delays are broken down into two groups – the warm/dark analog delay and the crisp digital delay. The analog delay tone is perfect for thickening your guitar with the trailing repeats, while the digital delay is great for more extreme repeats as well as cleaner, U2 style, rhythms. The reason why the DD-3 stayed on, was because of a few items – size, simplicity and tone.
The Boss DD-3 has a small foot print, and is insanely easy to use. When I start exploring other pedals, they get big and complicated quick. I just need long clean repeats.. and something I can adjust the feedback/repeats with. Hard to beat the DD-3 for this. I feel like the tone is great, and is exactly doing what I need it to sound like.
This morning, I came across a nice little deal on this guy. If I was looking, I would pull the trigger on this. Right now on Amazon, the Boss DD-3 Digital Delay is on sale for $125 (with free shipping). The Boss DD-3 is normally in the $140 range, so it’s a good opportunity to pick this up.
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10 years ago
What you really “need” Hank is the best of both worlds which is a vintage, MIJ Boss DD-2!!! The “long” chip in the 2 gives it a much warmer, robust sound than the 3 BUT it has all the versatility of the 3.
It is based around the chip made for the Roland SDE-3000 rack mounted digital delay. By luck, the chip just fits across the width of the compact pedal and for months the design team worked to squeeze the rest of the components onto the printed circuit board. The design is utilizing a 12 bit AD converter producing a flat frequency response between 40Hz and 7kHz. The DD-2 did officially go out of sale in 1986 but it was relaunched without changes as the DD-3 and has continued its life through till today. Sometimes bargains do crop up on eBay, GearPage, Craigslist, etc.
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