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Our days of stompbox bounty have had an interesting—in some ways polarizing—effect on the state of delay. At the “analog” extreme, bucket brigade delays and powerful digital processors generate and painstakingly emulate the sounds of tape, drum, and other analog echoes. At the other end, digital processing makes delay and reverb more boundless, inorganic, and galactic-scale than ever.
Somewhere between those two points on the echo spectrum lives good old digital mid-fi. And with ’80s musical textures more en vogue now than at any time since Alf was a media titan, musicians and manufacturers are re-discovering the charms of echoes from digital’s infancy. Not surprisingly, EarthQuaker Devices—who have never found a weird or underutilized sound they could not turn to magic dust—have taken the voice of early digital delay and enhanced it with modulation features that make the dirtier side of digital seem downright intoxicating. But the coolest thing about the Space Spiral is the wealth of tones that exist outside of stylistic or period constraints. There are a lot of very unique sounds on tap.
Though the Space Spiral is an original circuit, you can spy a few possible inspirations in the control layout and functionality—most notably Ibanez’s mid-’80s DML series, which used LFO-driven modulation to tweak digital repeats. But where the Ibanez was designed to deliver literal (if sometimes intense) chorus and flange-style modulation, the range and interactivity of the Space Spiral’s controls make it easy to generate sounds well outside the ’80s tone canon.
The controls themselves are simple to understand, even if their range and sensitivity take some getting used to. The delay controls are a standard time, rate, and mix array, although the latter is especially sensitive and does not include a 100 percent wet setting. The modulation section is simple and mostly self explanatory: Depth and rate control the intensity and speed of the modulations, while the shape control alters waveforms from triangle- to square-wave profiles as you move through its range.
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