DL4 Delay Modeler

Line 6 made its name modeling amplifiers in software, first in combo amps, then in the POD. By the late ’90s, as the company put it, “our thoughts have often turned from our amps to our feet.” It borrowed a long list of vintage pedals from their owners and studied them for its models.

It also brought in Jeorge Tripps, who was running his own boutique pedal company, Way Huge, at the time. The idea, he said, “was to create a digital pedal with analog functionality”: a 16-position selector knob, five knobs to tweak it, and four footswitches that felt like an old stompbox’s.

The DL4 came out in 1999, one of a family of four green boxes with the MM4, FM4, and DM4. It was big and it was very green, and it earned a nickname: the Big Green Monster.

Turn the big knob and you go through fifteen delays, most of them based on old machines. The Tube Echo is based on the 1963 Maestro Echoplex, the Tape Echo on its solid-state successor. There’s a Roland Space Echo, a Boss DM-2, an Electro-Harmonix Memory Man, and a TC Electronic 2290 that ducks its repeats while you play. The Lo Res delay sounds like early-’80s digital, crunchy at 8 bits. The Reverse plays your phrase backward, up to 1.25 seconds behind you.

The sixteenth position is the Loop Sampler, and here Tripps had a problem:

Technically, we couldn’t get quite 15 seconds of loop time; it was like 14 and change.

So they took the few hundred milliseconds left over and turned them into an echo in front of the looper. You get 14 seconds of loop, 28 at half speed. Double-tap the switch and it plays in reverse. Overdub on top and the older layers get a little quieter each pass until they fade away.

It runs on four C batteries if you like. All four lights flash when they’re running out.

After “Fine + 2 Pts,” Knudson went all in. For Minus the Bear’s next record, Menos el Oso, in 2005, he was “in full-on loop and sampler mode. Eight of the 11 songs on that record have sampled riffs.”

Put the album on and listen for the guitar riffs that come around and around. Knudson never tied the pedal to one track, but he did say: “I’ve yet to find another sampler pedal that works as well as the DL4.”

His top three pedals, he says, would be “the DL4, a DL4, and then another DL4.”

Mary Halvorson got hers in 2000 or 2001, during a year at the New School’s jazz program, before she had used effects much at all. Then, by accident, she “happened to turn the Delay Time knob while I was playing.” The notes bent. She kept it.

With an expression pedal plugged in, she rocks the delay time with her foot and the pitch of the repeats slides, “almost like using a whammy bar.” She has made it sound like a pitch shifter or a ring modulator. By 2015 she’d been playing one for fifteen years and had gone through three or four.

Bill Frisell keeps a Lo Res delay, a Reverse delay, and a Reverse cranked to full speed, which comes out sounding like a ring modulator. Before the DL4 he used an Electro-Harmonix 16-Second Digital Delay that Robert Quine had shown him. Why stay with the green box? “I’m so familiar with how it works that using it is super-intuitive and I never have to think about anything.”

And Joff Oddie of Wolf Alice, who doesn’t think he’d ever used a delay pedal before, heard the Sweep and Reverse sounds, “so otherworldly yet at the same time organic.” In his words: “I never gave my manager the pedal back.”

In 2022 Line 6 put out the DL4 MkII, with thirty delays, fifteen of them new, and a Legacy button to get the original fifteen back. The first DL4 is no longer made.

It was built to copy old machines faithfully, and it did. But the sounds people made records with were the ones nobody wrote in the manual: a loop played out of boredom, a knob turned at the wrong moment, an echo set backward and run too fast.