Compact and great sounding delays with awesome looper integration

I had the smaller Canyon and enjoyed it very much, I reviewed it as a great alternative to the more established Boss DD7/8 and the TC Flashback. For a couple of months now I sold ALL my pedals and only kept a looper for practicing, but the Grand Canyon caught my attention one day sitting at my local guitar shop and I couldn’t resist it:

• 225€ Competitive price, considerably cheaper than most comparable stompbox delays (only 80€ more than the Canyon, half the price and size of a Strymon Timeline)
• Relatively simple layout and quick operation with no menus
• Very small and compact.
• Unique looper integration

I’m really enjoying the GC, right now it's actually the only pedal I have. It can do simple and great sounding analog delays in a quick and intuitive manner, but it can also surprise you when feeling in the mood for something special but you don't have the pedal right there... like a pitch shifter/octaver, a reverb, a bit crusher, chorus, vibrato, double tracker, rotary, some wicked flanging sounds and also a very cool synth/swell voice. The delays sound really good.

But to me what really sets this pedal apart in this price range is the nifty way the looper is integrated. The magic of the Grand Canyon lies in it's powerful 16 min post-delay looper where you can loop your delayed sounds to create big and intricately evolving sonic landscapes, and then speed/pitch it all up and down, reverse it, layer it, undo/redo, and doing all this hands-on with zero menu browsing.

It replaced my MXR Clone Looper and I’m not missing it, the GC looses true bypass analog dry through but makes up in extended looping time and the amazing variable speed/pitch control.

EHX states the pedal features a “high quality analog buffered bypass”, what I believe this means is that your signal is not going through any Analog to Digital converters when bypassed, but if you switch on Tails the manual states you enter “DSP Bypass” mode, and most likely your signal is being converted in this mode, and you can definitely feel a tiny difference on the noise floor, but I have no problems using either, and I love the Tails + Momentary combination. The manual states “24 bit resolution” which is nice to know, but it doesn’t state its sampling rate. The buffer feels very good indeed. Also worth mentioning is the pedal consumes a very modest 150ma and never gets hot, which is very surprising for such a compact pedal. it wakes up in 3 seconds and - like the Canyon - always recalls your loop and the “undone” parts as well.

Build quality I must say is very good for the price, big thumbs up to EHX. All the switches and potentiometers feel very sturdy with zero rattling, the only minor rattle you get when shaking the pedal are the footswitch cables hitting the main board (see gut shot), the soft relay type footswiches feel great. It comes with a dedicated power supply, another thumbs up. And the pedal looks very sexy, I felt the Canyon looked a bit cartoonish but I don’t know why the Grand Canyon just looks a bit more serious. The pedal is very responsive, every switch and pot feel very immediate like an analog unit, the DMM mode responds very much like an analog delay. There’s the tiniest “delay” when switching from delay+looper to looper only mode (can't figure why). The tiniest I mean something like less than half a second. Everything else is dead on responsive, including switching delay modes with the rotary dial. EHX went for this approach on this pedal like it did with previous pedals such as the Hazarai Memory Man or the Cathedral, with a list of delay modes and sub parameters with corresponding red led for each. The labels and secondary parameters have a very small lettering, so it may take a while for you to get acquainted and navigating the delay modes. The selector knob doubles as a preset switch, each delay mode only has 1 preset, but it works very well and is super responsive, very easy to re-tweak small details on saved presets. Note that the delay trails of a selected mode do not carryover when you switch the delay mode.

Thanks to the Delay/Looper switch you can use the pedal just as a delay with dedicated tap tempo / runaway feedback, just as a looper with dedicated rec and stop, or you can use both together, and you can you can easily cicle between all modes without interruption of the looper. While in Delay + Looper the delay footswitch doubles as a tap tempo just like the Canyon did, but you can also disable this feature if you want.

Using the delay by itself is very simple and straightforward with the 3 classic Time, Feedback and Level knobs. The subdivisions switch allows for a total of 9 different tap tempos.

Now for the delay modes. All modes are well thought out and sound good, and the secondary parameter editing is very rich yet simple and super responsive. But this is not the most exquisitely realistic Tape or Drum emulator, and that is not saying it's not good, the Grand Canyon sounds amazing don't be fooled (for most part sounds better or at least as good as any Boss DD8/200, TC Flashback, Line 6 DL4, it's just less focused on ultra realistic tone tweaking like the more modern digital modelling analogue/magnetic delays as the Strymon's, Source Audio's, and the newest Universal Audio's. Also no MIDI or USB means it's a frozen design with no future firmware updates, which honestly doesn't bug me at all, it's a guitar stompbox not a DSP sound interface. My favourite modes are DMM and Tape, I also really like Shim and Reverb. Reverse sounded surprisingly good although I don't use it that much. If you play a stereo rig the Doubler is also a superb feature. Tape mode sounds very good, but the Flutter Depth is really just a mod depth LFO with a sharper sine curve, usable, the distortion adds a cool character to the repeats but only until 12 o'clock, after that it's just too much. Drum mode is also very cool but nowhere near the Volante, but its curious the way the delay time responds in this mode, you really feel the drum speeding up and down. Drum Age is not as good as the Tape Distortion, its more of a tone control really. The pedal features two hidden secondary modes for Drum (unlocking a total of 21 head patterns) and the Pitch mode also, allowing you to have cascading pitches like the default Canyon or only 1 pitch shifted. Oh and in pitch mode you have a basically a Pitchfork available to you with lot's of different interval combinations. Echo and Mod are the the same base engine with different secondary parameters, both sound really good and allow lot of different combinations, with flanging sounds, chorus, vibrato, or old videogame-like tones with the bitcrusher, the high/low pass filtering is also very cool on the first echo and allows very cool yesteryear digital delay sounds. I must say the Multi mode and the Sample/Hold are also surprisingly good and creative options, possibly the most well thought out modes that allow for very interesting echo effects.

Looping on this pedal is great, the best Looper integration I’ve seen on a delay pedal. I only wished you could overdub automatically when finishing the first loop phrase, so the delay trails would fill in the beginning of the Loop. The speed/pitch control is super fun and works flawlessly, and it’s even possible to record these speed variations, which is super fun:

When you start recording your first loop (that will set the loop duration) you are stuck recording in "normal" speed mode. But after that you can speed it up to its max (octave up) and record another layer on top which will get pitched down when you go back to normal speed. Also super cool if you have an expression pedal is to actually change the speed of playback WHILE recording. Your recording will be time stretched for very cool effects.

Of course it also record any delay variations you do, delay time, modulation, all get recorded when overdubbing, so it’s an amazing pedal for ambient and experimental stuff. The Delay path is allways pre Looper, so unlike the Timeline, you can't have the delay effects effecting the loop. It would be cool to have that but honestly I'm ok only having the pre-looper routing option. The fadeout knob works very well, as well as the Dry Cut, although I was hoping this knob would cut all the recorded Dry guitar loops and only leave you with the wet delayed parts, but it’s just a level control for input of the Looper, handy if you want to do a lot of layers. The Dub Level is also great, progressively fading out older loops. You must set your looper settings in Looper mode and those will be active when in Delay+Looper mode.

EHX favored a simpler hands on approach to the pedal where everything you can control is readily available at your fingers and foot, including tails and momentary buttons on the surface of the pedal which is a great combo for freeze/drone parts. It feels very well thought out, although one could easily point out things that could be designed differently. The dedicated loop Level pot for exemple, maybe it could double as a tone control for the delays, or even the dedicated ping pong or expression switches, they may seem a bit of real estate waste since they could have been ANYTHING else or have a more complex switching. For better or worse EHX went for the “Keep it Simple”. I can feel just by looking at this pedal the many hours of R&D meetings the folks at EHX must have had. They are big, and they can compete with any big name in the pedal industry. Their PCB boards and components ARE actually made oversees to keep price low, but everything else that matters on a digital delay pedal is pure EHX. This is not just a gimmicky pedal or toy, you feel Mike Mathews and his great team at EHX in NYC wanted a pedal that could deliver great delay tones and a really great looper integration, like a modern and smaller DL4. And for sure they got the job done right.

Least positive aspects:

• I would personally prefer to have some way of storing different loops (or at least two, a live loop and a preset loop...) instead of only having one loop with 16 min available, and most probably they discussed this, but then again, it would complicate the design and add another 10 pages to the manual.
• Navigating more complex parameters with the black trim pots can be a bit cumbersome, especially when selecting different head patterns in drum mode or different pitch combinations in pitch mode.
• Although it is simple compared to other delay workstations it still has a bit of it's own learning curve, with such small lettering and combinations of footswitch instructions, it may be too complicated for someone just looking for a simple short delay.

Overall I highly recommend this pedal to ambient/drone players or anyone who wants a fully featured and modern delay pedal with awesome looper integration without busting the bank. The ability to loop the delays opens this pedal up for a lot of creativity, with pitch shifted bass lines, shimmery synth leads, rhythmic patterns, etc. The stereo outs are a great feature even if you play a mono rig, you can always hook it up to an audio interface and recorded BIG and WIDE stereo delays and doubler effect, or even to use with synths/keyboards. At half the price of a Strymon Timeline the Grand Canyon kicks some serious ass, really worth checking out. It's my newest and only pedal right now.

Here’s a quick test loop I did: https://m.soundcloud.com/miguelangelodp/loading