Picture a time before the delay pedal. An era when guitarists couldn’t conjure slapbacks or ping-pongs at the click of a footswitch. To anyone who came up during BOSS’s half-century reign, the notion is unthinkable. After all, with today’s range offering everything from next-gen trailblazers like the DD-500 to modern takes on classic units like the Space Echo, Delay Machine, DM-2, DD-3 and SDE-3000, fans of this vital effect have never had such mindblowing tools under their boots.
But delay wasn’t always so accessible or user-friendly. When the original tape echo effect first pricked up ears in the 1940s, it was the preserve of professionals players in top recording studios, and created using bulky mechanical reel-to-reel machines notorious for their expense and impracticality.
Still, for the select few with access to the technology, astonishing sounds were possible. In subsequent years, a run of tape-based delay units rose and fell, from the Echoplex to the Watkins Copicat. But arguably the first to achieve global use was 1974’s RE-201 Space Echo, developed by BOSS’s sister company Roland. Outgoing president Yoshihiro Ikegami started his long career at Roland assembling these units – and they’re still widely saluted as the greatest tape delay of all-time.
Employing a capstan-driven tape format that reduced the mechanical parts, the Space Echo’s branding implied its speciality: unlike simpler rivals, the Roland supplied a widescreen, spacey flavour, sweetened by onboard reverb. As everyone from Hank Marvin to Bob Marley agreed, there was nothing quite like it.
Even so, while the original RE-201 was an industry-standard for studios at the highest level, the original unit’s cost and dimensions were a non-starter for the majority of musicians who plied their trade on the stage. Fortunately, by 1978, the fast-rising BOSS company was ready to pick up that gauntlet, having forged its own identity beyond Roland, and now ready to innovate on its own terms.
BOSS deftly mirrored the styling cues of the original RE-201 Space Echo tape delay in its recent, latter-day digital recreation, the RE-202 (Image credit: Future)
That year, BOSS launched its first echo unit in the form of the DM-1 Delay Machine, employing the charge-coupled device (CCD) technology usually associated with cameras and offering flexible analogue delays of up to 500 milliseconds. While the Space Echo remained more capable in outright performance, the Delay Machine eclipsed it for practicality, with the tank-tough metal chassis and on/off footswitch announcing that delay was easily practical as a live effect for the first time. And soon, with BOSS’s early compact stompboxes flying off shelves at the turn of the decade, the company’s ever-curious engineers wondered: could the DM-1’s revolutionary delay capabilities be shrunk further still?
In 1981, the DM-2 answered that question in style. Identified by its magenta chassis, this was BOSS’s first compact analogue delay, now featuring bucket brigade device (BBD) tech – with a huge 4,096 stages – that granted up to 300 milliseconds of delay while making the sound warmer and softer.
