Boss DD-200 Digital Delay – Thomann Norway
Boss DD-200 Digital Delay – Thomann France
THE GAS STATION 104 TOTAL GUITAR NOVEMBER 2019 REVIEW 1 SCREEN Without the deep menu system of the DD-500, sometimes the manual is called for 1 2REAR PORTS There are expansion jacks for expression and stereo 2 in and out 3 3DIVISIONS CONTROLS Tap subdivisions and preset recall are neatly arranged on the front of the pedal BOSS DD-200 £219 The DD-500 has a new younger brother. So, are the kids alright? T he release of the compact 200 series pedals from Boss makes sense. It's been a couple of years since their flagship 500-series models came out, leaving their older dualfootswitch pedals like the DD-20 in need of an update. Enter the DD-200; with the powerful processor of the larger DD-500, but a reduced footprint, it's designed to be a pedal you might dual mode, which as you'd expect shines in stereo, and found it easy to dial in compelling rhythmic delays using the dotted eighth subdivision setting. The patch we kept returning to, however, was the shimmer mode. With the mix up past twelve o'clock, a high feedback level and the tone pulled back, we found it incredibly expressive for slow, picked arpeggios and even ALL IN ALL, THE DD-200 IS AN IMPRESSIVE PIECE OF KIT choose over the 500 for practical reasons, rather than questions of budget alone. As you'd expect, the sounds are all here, from digital delays to tape recreations. As with the DD-500, we found the reverse delay to be good, but somehow less usable than it feels on the discontinued DD-6 and current DD-7 compact pedals. There are no such issues with the `standard' delay modes, however, which are excellent. We spent a lot of time on the quicker chord-based lines. For busier work and post-rock tremolo picking the tape delay sounds were our go-to. Here the Boss unit stacks up pretty well against competitors like the Strymon El Capistan. The pad echo and tera echo modes also proved effective for more ambient chord work, especially combined with swells using the guitar volume knob, though these days those kinds of expansive reverb-delay sounds are outclassed by the software available for studio use. Finally, although we're fans the pattern delay on the larger DD-500, it's a bit harder to dial in on the smaller pedal, which reduced our willingness to fiddle with it. The DD-200 is an impressive piece of kit, and the trade-off between interface and pedal size is mostly worthwhile.Though admittedly we had to reach for the manual several times, and the pedal obviously doesn't offer the same capacity to easily tweak parameters on the fly that its larger sibling does. Moreover, with a firmware patch, the DD-500 can be configured to run three delays from one patch, one at a time, or two in either series or parallel, and for us that makes the DD-500 the more desirable option. Doubly so, as the difference in street price is under a hundred pounds from most retailers. Alex Lynham FEATURES SOUND QUALITY VALUE FOR MONEY BUILD QUALITY USABILITY OVERALL RATING AT A GLANCE TYPE: Delay pedal with 2-bit AD/DA, 32-bit processing, 96 kHz sampling rate MODES: 12 delay modes and 60 second 105 looper CONTROLS: Bypass and Tap footswitches, with room for expansion footswitches and expression on the rear POWER: 9V DC or 3 x AA batteries CONTACT: Roland UK roland.com/uk NOVEMBER 2019 TOTAL GUITAR Photography: Olly Curtis SUMMARYAdobe PDF Library 15.0 Adobe InDesign CC 13.1 (Macintosh)