h_pr's Danelectro Music Gear Setup

The Danelectro Reel Echo is a digital delay that simulates a tape delay and offers quite a few options to shape the sound. There's a toggle switch to simulate a solid state or a tube preamp and another one to simulate tape warble, and there's a "lo-fi" control to dial in the desired amount of signal decay, from none at all to a very unstable sound that disintegrates almost immediately. With the lo-fi control at minimum and the repeats knob at maximum, the delays will repeat infinitely (without self-oscillation), so the pedal can be used as a micro-looper with loop lengths between 0 and 1.5 seconds, which allows interesting possibilities in conjunction with the sound-on-sound button.

What are the drawbacks? First of all, I'm not a big fan of the footswitches, which haven't aged well. Sometimes they won't register when I step on them and occasionally one of them gets stuck (stepping on them again usually works though). It can also a bit of a disappointment for some that the pedal behaves more like a digital delay than a tape delay when you change the delay time: it will not create the sound of a tape speeding up and slowing down, but it will simply chop up the signal into smaller bits or add breaks to the signal. This can result in interesting effects and be very useful for experiments, but it's not exactly what a tape delay would do, and it also means that you can't create any "space ship" sound effects. Finally, the pedal is big and takes up a fair amount of real estate on your board.

Nevertheless, I like it a lot. It sounds good and sports a unique design with a very intuitive interface, and if you are aware of what it can do and what it can't do, it can be put to uses that other delays cannot offer.

This may be the best digital delay that you can buy for under €30. Clean, pristine sound, noise free, and well balanced tone.

The form factor and the knobs take some getting used to, and the plastic enclosure is probably how they got to the price point, but it's more solid than it looks. If you need a digital delay and are on a very tight budget, you can't go wrong with this one.

As the boss of Danelectro is the person who had designed the famous fOXX Tone Machine fuzz in the 1970s, it comes as little or no surprise that this tiny piece of plastic has exactly the same circuit inside and sounds almost identical (minor differences might be explained by component tolerances). Unfortunately, in one other aspect it also copies the Tone Machine, and that is the lack of a status LED, which is an important issue as the footswitch is somewhat flimsy and doesn't always switch as expected, so some visual feedback if it worked is sorely needed. Other than that, it's the sound of one of the greatest fuzzes of all times at a budget price.

This is a compact digital delay that offers "studio" (room), "church" and "plate" reverb. It sounds good if it's mixed in subtly, but can become quite cold and metallic at long delay times or with the Mix knob approaching the full wet position. This may be exactly what you need if you are into experimental or dark ambient tones, or you may consider it a bit too digital. Still, it's one of the better digital reverbs in this price range and form factor.

This is the revised version of the Cool Cat Transparent Overdrive, issued after Danelectro discontinued the first version when they found out that the Chinese engineers they had commissioned to design a transparent overdrive had instead copied the Paul Cochrane Timmy pedal. This one has a modified circuit that sounds less like a Timmy and has four DIP switches in the battery compartment that let you switch between various clipping options to determine how "heavy" you want it to sound. As it is a "transparent" overdrive, it doesn't add anything interesting to your sound, so you need a good amplifier to start with. It's also designed to drive your amp so that the amp rather than the pedal does the distortion job, so don't expect much if you use ir on the clean channel of a solid state amp. If you know what you're looking for in a transparent overdrive, then it's an excellent one for the price, and a more than decent one regardless of the price, but it is not the fabled Danelectro Timmy clone. If you are looking for that one, expect to pay a bit more on the used market for version 1 (with the yellow label)

This is a compact tuner with bright, readable display and solid functionality (including strobe and ultra-precision tuning), but there was a problem with noise interference with my setup (a faint chirping sound) that didn't go away no matter what power supply I used. As I didn't want to run it on batteries, I got a PolyTune instead, which had no noise issues.

Maybe one of Danelectro's best overdrive designs. This has been designed to break up your tube amp rather than provide much distortion by itself, so it gives a ton of volume to your sound. There's also a subtle, well balanced mid boost that adds presence and a touch of warmth to the guitar tone - I like this a lot, so much that for a while I used the PoT on a lower volume setting just to color the guitar sound a bit.

This would easily have been a 5-star pedal if two of them hand't given up on me (fortunataly still within the warranty period). After a few months of regular use, both started to make scratchy noises while and briefly after switching them on; later, one eventually started to switch itself on and off at random, wile the other one died completely. This seems to be a tragic case of a fantastic pedal manufactured under insufficient quality control.