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I am a big fan of Delay effects I love how you can do anything from fatten up your tone to special effects. I own a Vox Time Machine and to be honest I realised fairly quickly that it wasn’t really what I needed because I like to let my amp tubes do the talking when it comes to overdrive, I think it is a waste to just use my Black Pearl on a clean setting and use pedals for overdrive. The problem with this is that if you use a delay pedal in front of an overdriven amp the tube compression will squash your delay effect and make it sound pretty crappy so you need to use the amp’s effects loop between the preamp and power amp, unfortunately my Time Machine does not allow this as it is instrument level only. Well you can imagine my excitement when I read that the TC Electronic Nova Repeater allowed not only for instrument level but also for line level in order to use it in an amp effects loop, and even more excitement when I was sent a Nova Repeater to review.

The Nova Repeater is described by TC Electronic as their “new ‘no-frills-with-a-sound-that-kills’ delay pedal. It is the pedal for you if you are a demanding guitarist who wants instant, high quality and unique results, without any of the fuss!”. To call this a no-frills pedal is almost absurd as it is packed full of a number of great features including things that don’t even exist on it’s big brother the Nova Delay. Mind you the features are incredibly easy to use, you don’t need a manual for this pedal.

The five knobs are self-explanatory: Delay (delay time), Feedback, Tone, Mod and FX Level. You can adjust the tone of the delay to suit your setup, for instance if you prefer the delay to sit back in the mix a little like an analog delay just roll off the tone, for more analog style effect try rotating the Mod knob from the 12 o’clock position either toward the Vibrato or Chorus settings. The FX Level pot lets you adjust the wet level of your signal which means that you won’t get level drops on your dry sound a common problem with other pedals.

Under the 5 knobs are 5 buttons: Spillover, Kill Dry, Range, Type and Division. Spillover refers to the way the pedal works when you step on the on/off button, with the button activated the tails of the delay effect will continue when the pedal is switched off, otherwise they are immediately killed. The Kill Dry button makes it possible to use the pedal with an amp that has a parallel effects loop. The Range button switches between 3 ranges, Min, Mid and Max, there is a graphical chart on the pedal which shows the range of each setting in milliseconds. Type lets you choose between 6 different settings: Studio, Analog, Tape, Dynamic, Reverse and Ping Pong. Studio is your pristine digital delay setting but you can use the Tone and Mod knobs to colour the sound to your liking. Analog and Tape are similar except Tape adds a little bit of clipping to the delay signal both giving you that classic analog delay sound. Dynamic is an adaptive delay that automatically sets the perfect threshold for the ducking. No calibration is needed even if you decide to turn up the volume during a solo, Nova Repeater will automatically adjust the threshold on-the-fly. I wasn’t really so much of a fan of this mode as the ducking is quite severe when you are playing, you might as well have the delay switched off. Ping Pong bounces the delay effect between the left and right channel if you are using a stereo set up. Finally the Division button lets you decide between a quarter note, dotted eighth, eighth note triplets and 3 dual delay types which when used in stereo split the delays left and right the first a quarter note + dotted eighth, quarter note + eighth note triplets and quarter note + eighth note. When you are only using the left output and a dual delay mode is used, the left and right delay signals are summed and played over the left output.

Last but not least there is a Tap Tempo button which also has TC Electronic’s Audio Tapping feature, simply hold down the button which will mute the ouput then strum quarter notes on your guitar at the tempo required then let go of the Tap Tempo button and you are all set. Clever feature especially if your drummer is counting you in, you can just silenty strum along and set your delay up each song.

So how does it sound? Well quite simply it does everything I want in a Delay pedal and allows me to get everything from perfect digital sounding delays to clipped analog delays with emulated wow and flutter and best of all works perfectly with my amp in the effects loop. I can’t find a single bad thing to say, the construction of the pedal is solid and heavy, the LED’s make the pedal easy to read in low lighting and there are enough features to make this a great studio effect as well as live. I would happily replace my Time Machine with a Nova Repeater and I think it is the last Delay pedal I will ever need to buy and at $169 they are ridiculously great value for money.

TC Electronic website

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