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DIY Digital Tape Delay

8/10 owned actively-used second-hand updated 2026-09-27

Handbuilt PT2399-based delay pedal kit from DIY Music Gear

Digital Tape Delay

Maker	DIY (handbuilt)
Model	Digital Tape Delay
Type	Delay

Store

Store	Price	Checked
DIY Music Gear	325kr	2026-09-20

Description

A delay pedal I built myself from a kit, my second pedal build. I'm learning how to make pedals, so I bought this kit from the store. Unlike a distortion pedal, which is relatively simple, just a few diodes and basically you have to amplify the signal until it clips and goes square, a delay is a bit more complicated, because you're messing with the modulation of the audio and also with its timing. Sometimes only the timing, sometimes only the modulation. But it's still a relatively easy pedal to build.

It's a digital pedal, so it has some integrated circuits and some processors, pretty classic ones actually, plus an operational amplifier and a 555 timing circuit, which is very common in most digital delay pedals. The idea behind it is to imitate the sound of the old tape delays, which were recorded onto a tape and played back after, so as you kept playing it back and re-recording the tape it got worn out and the signal got deeper and darker every time.

Impressions

I really like the sound of it, especially when it's in a fast mode of operation, so a delay with few repetitions, up to 100 or 200 milliseconds. Basically an echo.

It gets pretty weird when you have to do longer repetitions or a lot of repetitions, it kind of becomes a reverb, except that the signal is perfect over time. It doesn't have that natural degradation that keeps happening, which makes the sound a bit artificial, and I don't like that much.

A curious fact about this pedal is that it's very small and it has a lot of components, so it's really hard to assemble. It's very tight, there are a lot of wires going from one side to the other and it's not very nice to fit together. It also has a lot of knobs.

Final thoughts

My next project after this one is to build a delay pedal using two techniques. One of them is bucket brigade, which is a sequence of capacitors, and the other one is trying to simulate a more analog pedal using transistors without any kind of integrated circuit, so I would be building the integrated circuits myself out of the components. I would also really like to try an operational amplification using valves in these delay pedals, which I don't think has been done before, but that's another project.