Coffee Shop Pedals delivers ingenious feature-packed compact stereo London Fog Tape Style Delay
Following on from his smart stereo Cortado Reverb, by friend Benno has conjured up a quite superb Tape Style Delay - packed with some exceptionally smart features.
You get 4 different styles of delay, including a handy Dual Tape, and the powerful Playback Direction toggle-switch allows you to engage the Delay in Reverse, Forward, or both together in parallel - which is a little reminiscent of the Chase Bliss Reverse Mode C.
In my visual I’ve incorporated the secondary settings / parameters too - in order to give you a better understanding of this pedal’s capabilities. It truly sounds magnificent - and packs in some unique features you won’t find elsewhere. There are also 3 Onboard Presets - with 20 available via MIDI.
There are all manner of adjustments you can make to the output, and where the Delay Time is a clever mix of Playback Speed (sort of Range), and Time being a subset within that. Meaning you get incredibly fine control over the shaping of the delay - with Infinite Repeats also available.
The Control knob works slightly differently across the 4 Program Modes - while New Tape and Vintage Tape share the same Wow Modulation, and Old Tape combines both Wow & Flutter and Saturation. Finally the Dual Tape Delay option gives you all kinds of clever tap / division possibilities - where Quarters in Mono Mode become Ping Pong in Stereo Mode!
There’s a vast range of timings here too - from circa 16ms up to 2660ms - where slower timings have more ’artefacts’ and variances within the signal. Benno reports that when Playback Speed is all the way up, and Time is all the way down, then you get a minimum Delay Time of about 16ms. That allows you to get quick chorus and vibrato sounds with the pedal if you turn repeats down. Which is one of the things he loves to do with this pedal.
I’m not going to give a full blow-by-blow rendition of the Manual here - that’s well worth a separate read on the Coffee Shop Pedals Website. I’m mostly just covering off some of the more unique smart features you’re getting with this delay pedal!
Controls - Mix [Bypass Time], Program [MIDI Channel] : Net Tape / Old Tape / Vintage Tape / Dual Tape, Control [Global Time] - variously Wow Modulation / W&F + Saturation / Tap Divisions, Repeats [Trails], Playback Speed [Bend Speed], Time [Bend Timer] : Min 300ms | Max 2660ms, Playback Direction : Reverse / Both (Parallel) / Forward, Tap-Tempo / Hold for Bend Time Footswitch, Bypass / Div Footswitch, Press Both Footswitches to scroll through 3 Presets.
I'm a huge fan of Tape Delays - and I really love how this pedal has been engineered and executed. It seems right up my street! And obviously is goes straight onto the Wishlist!
The smart thing here is that is combines some significant depth of complexity with a pretty simple interface / control topology. Another feature I should mention is the Bend Time - which via long press on the Tap Footswitch allows you to glide momentarily to a different Time Interval - which then goes back to normal once you release that footswitch.
There's lots of smart little details here - but all can be operated very elegantly from just the surface controls - you can operate this pedal at a very basic level - or you can deep-dive into the secondary settings and parameters as you wish.
I feel Benno has got the mix of features here pretty much spot on - in an actually really appealing format overall. I can't really offer any criticism here - this pedal seems pretty magnificent to me for what it sets out to achieve.
The London Fog Tape Delay is available for order now via the Coffee Shop Pedals Webstore - where it goes for a very reasonable $309 CAD, which equates to around $228 USD and £180 GBP. I expect these to verily fly off the shelves!
Demos
12 Degrees of Saturation 2023 Compact Edition
