Today, I had the chance to give the Boss DD-7 a try.
I was skeptical at first, not knowing if its input would have enough headroom to accomodate the hot signal from my Bad Cat tube preamp… After a frustrating half an hour trying to cram the pedal among the others on my busy Pedaltrain, BANG!, it happened: I succeeded in getting what I was looking for, in a very simple and effective way: dry sound to the left, wet sound to the right, delay level at maximum, matching the dry sound (and not at 3 o'clock as per BOSS's instructions, which was kinda weird to notice), feedback at minimum (single repeat), delay mode set at 50ms and delay time at minimum (1-2ms). Exceptionally clean and effective thickening! On the DD-7, the travel of the delay time knob covers a span of 50ms, yet I don't know if it's done in a linear way (i.e. when the knob is at noon the delay time is what, half of the maximum, 25ms, or not?) So I used precaution and kept it at minimum (probably 1-2ms) but it was enough for the thickening effect to happen.
Having the two sides off-set only by such a small amount of time (1 or 2 milliseconds) should also be beneficent, I assume, for the TimeFactor's stereo effect lines, keeping any mess away.
For the record, I also tried the DD-7 in analog mode (where the minimum delay time is 20ms), but the wet side was too dark and the 20ms delay time was more towards an ambience/roomy effect than to pure thickening. This trial convinced me that an analog delay is not suited for the double tracking trick, at least the way I like the tones to be balanced.
I'm done with this, I'm going now to place an order for a DD-7 🙂
Thanks everyone who chimed in sharing their experience!
