Danelectro DR-1 Back Talk

this ia a plug and play, set and forget delay...every setting is useful

the best backwards delay that i've ever used, at least in a guitar pedal package--better than the hazarai memory man--better than a boss--this delay is dark, kinda of like my dod fx-90 I SAID KINDA!!

very quiet, but being a digital device--analog fans may find that this processes their sound too much--works best to run your instrument or mic into this first before the analog stuff (i run this before my mid-fi electronics pitch pirate with very interesting results)
if you're like me and combine digital with analog, then no worries

jacks and knobs are a BIG problem...i'm in the process ov getting FXdoctor to do a rehouse for mE--it's worth it since i'm keeping this delay forever...

none

styles ov music played:

harsh noise/power electronics

This is pretty easy to use. I worked with mine for about five minutes and got what I felt was a great "backwards tape" sound, which is exactly what I wanted.

It is not noisy, thank goodness. As I said, I wanted a backwards guitar sound, and this does it quite well. Back in the sities, I loved hearing The Beatles, The Byrds, and other bands experimentiing with backwards tape effects. The Back Talk allows me to approximate that sound well.

I think all the larger Dano effects are very reliable and built like tanks. I want to buy another Back Talk as a spare, but they're becoming harder and harder to find. I'm sure I'll find one soon.
Anyone got one for sale?

No opinion, but I have a guitarist friend who had a problem with a Dano echo pedal, and they sent him another one, no questions asked.

If this was stolen, I would go out of my way to get another. It's part of my sound. My band plays The Beatles' "Tomorrow Never Knows," and with this pedal, I can nail the droning sound of the original recording. I know there are other pedals that do the backwards echo thing. I tried the Memory Man with Hazarai, and I thought the bakwards effect was terrible compared to the Back Talk. All in all, I really like the Back Talk pedal. It's earned a permanent piece of real estate on my pedalboard.

Takes about 10 minutes to figure out exactly how to dial in the sound you want. Simple.

I am speaking as a guitar guy who has since come full-circle after surviving a high school guitar pedal fetish. These days I am happy with just a tube screamer and a tuner between me and the amp. I owned this pedal for about four years. It's great for fooling around at home, but the hard "swish!" sounds that happen when you loop a bunch of agressing playing kinda sucks. However, done delicately, it is nice and trippy. Nonetheless, I cannot imagine actually using this thing live. It's just awfully choppy, requires a lot of finesse. Fun, but probably better suited for goofing around at home or adding a weird nuance here or there to a home recording.

Completely reliable. Made of tough die-cast steel.

Not sure...

As I mentioned earlier, I currently don't get much of a thrill out of exotic guitar effects. That said, if your band likes to walk a line of weird/noise/annoying, this may just be your cup of magic mushroom tea. I think it would be better if it had a little bit longer "sample" capacity or had some way of cutting the aforementioned "SWISH/SLAP!" sound that happens o each repeat if you get too crazy with it. I used to have fun playing it at home, but often found it was a distraction that stood in the way of actually writing songs. To my ears, it's for rare garnish only. But hey, if weird non-hands-on noize makes you happy, you would definitely be getting a dependable, durable and unique addition to your rig by bying the backtalk.

3 knobs, easy

Ok, yea some of the settings on it seem pointless, but if you can get timing down some of the extreme settings (all of them cranked) can be pretty trippy sounding, and if you put the repeats low and everything else at 12 o' clock, you can get some very VERY full sounding slow leads if you're the only guitarist in a band like me. Also found if you add in a whammy pedal set on octave up and octave down , and add distortion, you can make your guitar sound like a radio changing frequencies, awsome if you ask me, very cool. Also extremely quiet.

Built like a tank, very VERY durable and SIIIICK looking

Never needed to have anything done to it, again built like a tank

Easy, intuative and downright fun. Go get one and wail people!

3 knobs, mix, speed, repeats.

Simple!

I'm giving it a 9 because I know my ears aren't that good, but it sounds great to me. I've used reverse delays on computers and this works and sounds just the same.

Built like a serious tank, 'cept for the knobs, but this pedal is huge and they are far away from the button to turn it on which is good.

Does what it should for a decent price!

At first I was going to get this pedal for the reverse delay effects, like all these other folks trying to get jimi hendrix and all that crap, but when i got it i thought reverse delay was really cheesy and you cant not use it live if you do it will just ruin the music, but then i fiddled with the knobs and i found out it has infinte feed back loops, which means you can create simpley a loop, but not just any loop a really creamy well meshed together notes mashed together loop if you use your swells right.

Sounds amazing, if you leave the infite loop on the repeats it can gather alot of noise, but if you take it back abit so it doesnt intensely gather up you can keep feeding it swells to keep the ambience going through it. I use 2 other danechos after in the chain with this through a fender twin reverb with reverb up to 10 and it sounds sooo blissful, with a squier super sonic.

I think it could last forever like everyone else said

Umm I repaired my other danecho my self but i never delt with custumer support

I play ambient music, in a band with 2 drummers. piano player, we do experiment with sound and im always looking for new sounds, i dont believe in playing guitar traditionally, although i do play blues and stuff, but i believe music is about art and using whatever sounds in the world are given to you and i dont neglect any instruments and this one is surely staying with me in the long run.

this pedal is very easy to use. like all danelectro pedals, everything is pretty self explanitory. the manual doesnt come with any 'pre-set' settings, but thats a-okay in my book. my rule of thumb is 'find your own tone'.

i run a various amount of guitars (lately an epiphone les paul custom) through a pedal board consisting of Boss and Dano pedals and through a '76 Yamaha amp. A pedal i love to run the DR-1 with is my Boss DD-5. now, you might say 'that pedal already HAS reverse settings on it!' well, its not as good as danelectros. besides, i cant remember what settings i have to have everything on when i switch from delay to reverse and back during a gig. so I just made life a little easier and got the DR-1. what sounds REALLY kick ass is using an E-Bow, the DR-1 and the DD-5 on a tap tempo setting. and you can create some very amazing sounds and tones. I also plugged it into my Rhoades and tinkered with it. It sounds dramatically better than the DD-5 reverse settings.

this pedal, like the big Dano pedals are a billion times more reliable than Boss pedals. lets say youre playing a gig, and your pedal wont turn off after youve stepped on it because a cable is caught under it. you wont ever have that problem with dano's. not to mention if you were to throw this pedal at someone, it could probably hospitalize em. this thing is built like a rock. (except for maybe the knobs, but you gotta take care of your stuff, ya know?)

I play all types of music, but on any interludes, i use this pedal religiously. it adds so much more feel to the notes. this is the second DR-1 i've owned. my first one got stolen at a gig in Arizona. If this pedal could have anything extra, it would be a tempo input jack for a sustain pedal to plug into like the DD-5.

hmmm. there are lots of downright un-useable settings on this thing, at least for the types of sounds i wanna hear. it took quite a bit of knob twiddling for me to find some cool sounds. and when i did find these settings, they were not at positions where the knobs were maxed, minimum, or at the midway position. in other words, ya can't just try the "no duh" settings--yer gonna hafta get on yer hands & knees & dig, dig, dig to achieve the tones you had in mind when you bought this pedal.

gibson s-1 w/lindy fralin p-90s > fuzzbox[i own quite a few] > dan armstrong orange crusher > danelectro backtalk > custom-built 3-watt tube amp. george l's cables connecting the whole set-up. first off, let me say that the sound quality of the backtalk is very clean. really no surprise there, as the delay tones produced by danelectro's dan-echo have sounded pristine to my ears when i have heard other guitarists using them. secondly, i must add that i am having no problem using fuzz/od/dist pedals w/the backtalk. another reviewer opined that it seemed the backtalk was only working for them in conjunction w/clean sounds. possibly the use of compression after the fuzz is the reason i'm having success? who knows. thirdly (is that a word?), another reviewer said that no speed setting less than 2 o'clock was of any use to him. while i see his point (that is, most of the interesting sounds DO lie in the 2 0'clock to 5 0'clock travel of the speed knob), i feel there are some cool sounds to be coaxed out of the backtalk with the speed at 12 o'clock, depending on song tempo and picking attack, while playing chords or sliding diads. lastly, it took me awhile, but i found the setting to get the sound i was looking for when i bought this pedal--that being the backward solo a'la hendrix sound. mix[3:30] speed[3:30] repeats[8:00]. give it a try.

i've owned four of danelectro's mini-pedals for several years now w/no problems. those pedals are small, inexpensive & have flimsy switches & knobs. nevertheless, they still are in fine working order. why? i take good care of my stuff. no mud-caked boondockers, no spilled beer-bongs, no crazy pedal-throwing friends allowed in my studio. compared to the dano minis, the backtalk is like a frickin' black box--if a plane crashes into my studio, the backtalk will be sitting there beside the destroyed fuselage, unaffected. so yeah, i think i can rely on it.

obviously, this is not an effect you can leave on all the time. therefore, it has to be rated accordingly. i mean, i'm not going to downgrade the backtalk just cuz i'm only going to use it sparingly. that would be like saying ANIMAL HOUSE sucks cuz john belushi isn't in enough scenes. his character was too crazy to be in more of the movie--it would have ruined it. yet, ANIMAL HOUSE is a great movie. my point? i think the judging the backtalk is very similar. you probably won't see it for long stretches of time, but when it does make an appearance... watch out.

3 knobs. One slip of paper in the box. That's about it. I can imagine things might be hard for some modern musicians, however. Cranking all the knobs all the way up doesn't necessarily produce a nice effect. So one point off.

I use this effect with a mix of 9 other vintage and modern Boss, EHX, Danelectro, and Dunlop pedals. It'd be superfluous to name them all. The sound quality of this effect is superlative; clear, undistorted, a surprising lack of the cheese factor I was expecting. No cheap tricks here friends, it literally reverses the original signal. However, as another reviewer mentioned, the fact that setting the speed under about 2 o'clock will produce a bunch of gurgling and sonic stumbling was right on the money. How I wish Danelectro had widened the range of this knob. This is definately a try-it-first effect...before the little nuances this pedal is capable of started popping up I was definately struck with a case of "why the hell did I buy this thing?" syndrome. Given that, I will repeat that trying it out first will either make your eyes grow wide with excitement or your lip curl in disgust. Although it is the least hit-and-miss of Danelectro's ill-conceived "hippy" effects line (the Psycho-Flange and Sitar Swami are both terrible), it still isn't perfect by any stretch of the imagination. Love the sound, hate the means of controlling it.

The only thing that has worried me about the "big" (metal-encased) Danelectro pedals is the knobs. I dont turn my pedals on by hitting them with a hammer, so reliability is rarely an issue to me. Cheapness, durablity, and decent tone is basically the Danelectro manifesto.

Danelectro always has and hopefully always will have the best customer service of any of the mass manufacturers. Send them a malfunctioning pedal back cold with the original packaging and it's replaced.

I play guitar and in my free time I like to spare people boring details about my life.

Try this pedal and see what happens. That's all I have to say. Delay/echo is the most versatile effect that exists, so get in there and start twisting knobs with reckless abandon.

No hace falta leer el manual de uso. Se trata mas bien de probar con los controles hasta conseguir el sonido que buscas, que seguro que acabas consiguiendo, pues es increiblemente versatil (de hecho, creo que es mejor que el reverse delay del boss dd-5)

Decir que es un pedal con muchas posibilidades es quedarse corto.
Con tres controles (mix, speed, repeats) pueden llegarse a conseguir todas las combinaciones que se quiera.
Ya no hay excusa para conseguir ese surrelista sonido que tienes en tu mente.
Puedes conseguir desde slap backs un tanto psycho, hasta delays infinitos (reverse, por supuesto) increiblemente psicodelicos y rallones (pilla una aspirina ya!)

Resulta muy interesante aunque tal vez no sea imprescindible dependiendo del estilo que toques.

Para ralladas psicodelicas-lsd-todomedavueltas no hay un competidor para este pedal!