Delay Effect

I record acoustic music (singer/songwriter, bluegrass, folk).  I have about 13 songs that I can use to experiment with and I want to learn to use a delay effect.

Which instruments and where could I used the delay effect most appropriately?

Thanks,

Tom

Hi Tom

Vocals and guitar would be most common. You normally wouldn''t use delay on bass or drums. You can kind of use the delay as an alternative to reverb - to give the instrument / voice a sense of depth and space. But for that style of music, probably not something where you want the delay to be noticed very much. I think some tempo-sync'd delay on acoustic guitar sounds really nice, especially if you use a Low Cut so only the higher frequencies are affected by the delay. It can give a strumming acoustic a really big sound.

Listened to a couple tunes on your website - nice stuff!

Thanks to everyone for the ideas.

Tom

A great advantage to using digital delay compared to analog delay is that you can easily dial in a timing setting that equates exactly to a particular note length.

You can use any number of delay calculators to compare your song's tempo to the millisecond timing of note lengths.

I heard a recently released song that was publicized as "all analog". The opening chords featured a delay. My first thought was that times sure have changed because the all analog delay had no relation to the tempo of the song... it just sort of went whap-whap-whap and didn't support the song at all.

best regards,
mike

-haha!

Lately I've played with delay. 

Things that resonate/reverberate have 'built in delay' ... Snare, Tom, and Kick ... hence, I try to avoid further delay with these (as per everyone).  And they record poorly for me ... perhaps because of these resonating skins.  Special close-mics may gate out or dampen out drum delay.

Pre-delays at 32-50 mHz have a full time status on my Plate-reverb Send.  For me, that singular delay sounds awesome on snare drums, distortion guitars, and vocs.  It makes my majestic reverb 'stand-out'.
Sonar's Lexican Plate Verb has served me well, thus, usually level-enveloped on the track level.  Reverb tails with plate reverb/pre-delay are my friend.

Slap-back delays:  (LT<-->RT channel 80-100%) Acoustic or electric guitars ... 40 to 50 msecs (or even greater)

Sonar Delay VST: Better and cleaner than plate reverb alone for rock-vocs (central panned).

Many combine Reverb and Delay for vocs (or dominant solos).  The Isotope Nectar pluggin also exploits this theory.

Per Mike, tempo-delays have a place.  Sometimes some of us just copy the phrase every 1/8th, 1/4th, etc. ... and decrement the volume directly.

Time would fail (for me) to discuss delay taps, pong-delays, and all the fx-delays available in DimPro, Waves, etc.