Boss PS-3 Pitch Shifter/Delay

If ever there was a BOSS compact pedal crying out for a reissue, it's this beast!

In 1994, as a callow 20 year-old, I blew my student loan on a four track. I had just enough dosh left for one pedal. First I tried the reverb, the RV-3, which was nice. I was about to get that when the bloke in the shop said, 'I think you should try this too.'

I was immediately gobsmacked by it. BOSS had somehow managed to fit a sophisticated rack-mounted 16 bit DSP engine into a guitar pedal. As I skipped through the 11 modes on offer, I realised that it was something of a Swiss Army Knife for the bedroom musician. Three modes gave you standard digital delay, and eight more gave you what were, at the time, groundbreakingly weird pitch and delay effects. It split the signal into two voices, each of which could be shifted independently; so you could do so much stuff with it. Debussy whole-tone cascading fairy ascending motifs; octaver effects; harmonist effects; bass imitations; robotic shimmery electronic noises; reverse delay, useful as a psuedo reverb; chorus-like detunes. And I never even got round to exploring the expression input. If I had, I'd have discovered that it can also be a whammy pedal.

There was so much it could - and still can - do. The only thing I missed was that changing the delay time didn't change the pitch, like on the DD-3. So, you can't do that spiralling feedback thing with it; you'll just get nasty clicks when you change the delay time as the clock gets reset.

But apart from that, this pedal was a masterpiece. It was discontinued in 1999. If there's one pedal I'd like to see BOSS reissue one day, it's this one. I put everything through it! Guitar, drum machine, synth. It made everything sound interesting - almost like a Rainbow Machine before there was a Rainbow Machine. Highly recommended for experimentalists.

This is a quirky pedal. It has a some nice digital delays and then several pitch shifted delays that get progressively weirder with each preset you try. Weird....and beautiful. Preset 7 is the famous one, a kind of pitch-shifted reverse reverb that sounds incredible when set fully "wet" and detuned one octave. I ran a chord progression out of my Ditto Looper into it...and when I closed my eyes I imagines I was floating just off the bottom of the ocean looking up at the surface. Dark and shifty.

One of the higher presets is either the effect used on the lead part in Radiohead's "My Iron Lung" or dead close to it. Really great pedal.

One quirk, the wet sound is slightly delayed off the dry. This bugs me a bit.

I've got this pedal on my board since the late 90's. It does many interesting things, combining delay and pitch shift. When I go on tour and arrange a minimal pedalboard to saveweight and space it is the only modulation pedal I take. It has a straight ahead digital delay, a digital chorus (detune) and with an expression pedal it can do Whammy too. The most unique mode is # 7 and it combines reverse delay with pitch shift. The resulting shimmering voice is pretty unique and it's the more I use the most. Very versatile and sturdy box, if you like strange noises and weird things - go get it.