DD-3 Digital Delay

The DD-3 is really the second chapter of a pedal that came out in 1983. Roland had a best-selling rack delay that year, the SDE-3000, and Boss’s engineers worked out that its custom chip, the one players still call the “long chip,” could fit inside a compact pedal. They put it in the same size box as Boss’s analog DM-2 delay and called it the DD-2.

It was the first digital delay in stompbox form, and the first digital pedal of any kind Boss made.

Digital, here, means your guitar gets turned into numbers by 12-bit converters, held for a moment, and played back. An analog delay like the Deluxe Memory Man passes the signal down a bucket brigade of tiny capacitors instead, and every repeat comes back a little more worn. They aren’t twins, and Ed O’Brien has the fairest description of the difference:

Slightly cleaner than an analog delay, but still has lots of character.

Then the chip got cheaper. When it did, Boss changed the pedal’s name to DD-3 and cut the list price, even though the DD-2 and DD-3 were otherwise completely identical. One explanation for the new name is that Roland didn’t want a lower price to look like a drop in quality. The DD-3 arrived in 1986, in August by one count.

Do they sound the same? Depends who you ask. The circuits match, but plenty of players say the two sound different, without claiming one is better.

The long chip itself didn’t last. Sometime in the very late ’80s a smaller square chip replaced it, with better bandwidth and better audio specs. Naturally, a lot of guitarists prefer the old one, darker and warmer and more lo-fi. That’s the “long chip” DD-3 people talk about. All told, the pedal has gone through three distinct versions.

The controls are plain. E.Level sets how loud the repeats are against your dry note. F.Back sets how many come back. D.Time sets how far apart they are, from 12.5 milliseconds out to 800.

The fourth knob, Mode, picks the range. S runs 12.5 to 50 ms, short enough to thicken a note more than echo it. M covers 50 to 200, and L covers 200 to 800, where the big, open repeats live. Then there’s Hold, which “repeats delay sound indefinitely.” Play a phrase, flip to Hold, and it keeps going under you. Call it a primitive looper.

There are separate Output and Dry jacks, so you can send the echo to one amp and the clean guitar to another. And an alkaline battery runs it for about 11 hours.

Look at the floors it ends up on. Tom Morello’s board in 2019 carried two DD-3s, one set longer for solos and one tighter for rhythm, next to a Phase 90, a Whammy, and a Cry Baby. Careful with the early records, though: on the first Rage Against the Machine album the delay was a DD-2.

Nels Cline’s Wilco rig in 2012 had a DD-3 and a DD-7 on the main board, with a Klon and a Whammy beside them, and a Deluxe Memory Man parked on the second board. Omar Rodríguez-López blended a DD-3 with a Small Stone, a Small Clone, and a filter on De-Loused in the Comatorium, and he uses the original version. Put on “Eriatarka” for his delay.

Ed O’Brien’s first compact Boss pedal was a DD-3, bought after he heard a Boss Micro Rack digital delay at an early rehearsal. He calls it “the sound of the ’80s.” The DD-5, in his book, is the sound of the ’90s, and that’s the one on The Bends and OK Computer.

Billy Duffy had no delay pedals at all in 1987, when he was supporting Billy Idol on the Whiplash Smile tour. Then he heard Steve Stevens at soundcheck and “was blown away.” He explains what a delay does better than any spec sheet:

The delay was there to make the guitar sound bigger and fatter and more impressive... it’s a cheat on the ear, a bit like the kind of reverb you get in a church as opposed to being in a basement.

He sets it around 800 ms. And he says why he landed on this one: “I’ve ended up using the DD3 ’cos it gives you that effect in an easily replaceable, robust, very reliable way.”

Boss has made plenty of delays since, with longer times and more modes. The original DD-3 is listed as discontinued now, and the line carries on as the DD-3T, the same pedal with tap tempo added. Noel Gallagher, meanwhile, has had the same road-worn DD-3 for twenty years and calls it the “greatest delay pedal of all time.”

Twenty years, same box. Whatever else goes on the plywood, it’s there.