Eventide Rose Blooms with Possibilities

One of the most utilitarian effects you can get is a delay. In a subtle setting, it adds some nuance and character to your sound, especially when you’re playing some whole notes during a slow ballad. In more drastic settings, you can make some awesome faux-looped things happen and possibly blend space and time. So, when the folk at Eventide Audio released the Rose Delay at this past NAMM, I knew immediately that it had a lot more than just one or two tones.

Under the Hood

The Rose Delay is a simple, pristine, super-modulated digital delay, that’s combined with all analog circuitry. Consider it a “bucket brigade” delay without any of the limitations. This gives you amazing sound quality and an incredible array of options. Because of this, the Rose Delay can seem a bit daunting or, dare I say, intimidating, at first glance. How do all the knobs and buttons work to make sounds? And, how intense of a read is the instruction manual? Fortunately, it’s heavily picture-based, and incredibly easy.

With the instructions, getting beautiful sounding delays almost immediately was easy. Spend about five more minutes with it to start understanding more of the parameters, and how they all work together.  For myself, this visual manual was invaluable. I had a reverse delay with heavy feedback quickly, and loved how it played off the harmonics I was using in one of my solo pieces.

Working the Parameters

The knobs by themselves are all very straight forward; if you only used those you’d have great sounds. It’s when you dive a bit deeper to see that the delay knob can do coarse or fine tuning of the delay time, the Hotswitch can be programmed for different functions (I use it as a tap tempo on one setting and reverse on another), and the feedback can really make things crazy is where the opportunities for the Rose Delay really start to bloom.

For those of us that do use different delay settings, the Rose Delay offers up five preset areas. So you can easily go from the reverse delay with feedback to your large hall delay to a chorus tone with just a push of a button. And if you’re begging for inspiration, the factory presets are sure to get you going with ideas.

Using it Live

This is where having presets becomes invaluable. I was performing over the weekend at the Tsunami Bass Hang, and had the Rose Delay on my “fly board.” Switching between a reverse delay, slapback and giant billowing delay was effortless.

It’s also nice to have everything set, and then all you have to do is tweak it for the room. While creating each of those tones doesn’t take a lot of time per se, having to do it between songs could be troublesome and lead to a little downtime.

In Review

The Rose Delay from Eventide Audio is amazing in its ease of use, allowing a player that wants usable tones to dial them in immediately. And for the player looking for crazier, more ambient textures and tones (raises hand), the interface allows for so much tweaking you could spend hours just playing around. And for both players, the ability to save presets makes it convenient to switch settings on the fly at a gig, recording session, etc.. Simply put, this is THE delay to get.

Visit eventideaudio.com for more information on the Rose Delay