Zoom 508 Delay

The manual is absolutely neccesary to start with it. It is a quite flexible stomp box and good delay effects can be obtained with a small amount of time. I have less than one week with it and I guess it is almost totally in the RAM of my brain.

I have an Ibanez RoadStar II 440, a Crate G60, a DOD Tec8g multieffects system and some other stomp boxes with this Zoom 508 Delay. It has many kind of delay effects that can go from 1 ms to 4 seconds. In the settings you can control the kind of delay to be used (normal, twin 4, twin, 6 echo etc.) and some of them can be adjusted to be stereo. The delay time is divided into two individual settings (one that multiplies a 100 ms scale and the other multiplies a 1 ms scale). The feedback can be adjusted from 0 to 99, this is like a damping factor (higher damp for smaller feedback values), and at 99 the delays almost never decay. Using the feedback set to 99 the instrument start acquiring data, mixing it up and replay it again up to a total sound mess (maybe somebody will find an use for this, I don't). The tone of the replay can has a different equalization to that the original segment (it can be the same brightness or lower equalized, 50 to 0 respectively). It has a mixing setting that can goes from 0 to 50, and this parameter is for the amplitude of the replayed (in percentage I can guess it goes from 0% to maybe 110%). This is another good reason to buy it. The last two settings are for the mixing between banks (you can select an overlap between the switching of the banks to make them smoother) and for the hold/tap (the tap is still not clear in my head, but the hold can be useful to record some very small (under 4 seconds) riff and play it again indefinetly). To hold the samples an external pedal is neccesary. I constructed a cheap hold/reset pedal by just using a momentary switch connected to a 1/4" plug to the ZOOM 508 pedal (the cost of this can be around $ 3.00). It works nicely for long delay settings. The sound quality is very good. It can be from a warm to a brigth delay. With some different settings you can "simulate" a reverb, chorus like sound and some strange distortions (with normal delays of less than 20 ms). Warm distortions can also be helped with this pedal. The combination of the Tec8g and the ZOOM 508 I think is very good for any afficionate guitar player. I am very happy with the sound of this effect and I recomend it.

I do not know yet, but I hope it will be good. I read many articles of people getting worried about the plastic shell of this effect. I personally think is much better constructed that what I expected, but of course it will never survive a free fall from the top of the Empire State Building.

I recomend it over a normal delay stomp box, because it is flexible and also provides 24 different patches to store your favorite settings (from helping a distortion, helping a chorus, helping a reverb effect or doing any good delay effect). The sound quality is very good for my needs. It is also very cheap compared to other delay effects and maybe the only one under $ 100 that can be programmed.

After you've read the manual, it should be no problem at all to edit your own patches. What's a little confusing are the doble functions of some of the buttons. But those are for functions I rarely use, so it doesn't really bother me.

Sound seems OK to me so far. You probably won't get anything better for the price. I mostly use the long delay settings (for looping), so I can't really say a lot about the other stuff. I've been using it with a Fender Strat and Chapman Stick (melody and bass strings) over my Fender guitar amp and a PA system. No annoying noises, at least live, don't know about recording.

No problems so far. It's plastic, but seems pretty robust.

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I have bought the pedal about 1/2 year ago, and I'm not disappointed. This is really good value for your money. My main use has been for some looping stuff. The 4 sec Delay is COOL! I have the additional footswitch, if I press it, the loop goes on to infinity. And with the seamless mode I can set up two loops simultaneously. Another very nice application is the use as a headphone practice amp.

Easy to use, most factory presets are setup well enough to just use out of the box, although I had to reset some of the mix levels to keep the delays from running over the signal. Editing Patches is just too easy. Manual is o.k., at least gives most of the info you need to get into the edit system and figure out what param does what. Not sure about firmaware, and nothing regarding this at Zooms web set.

I've used this with a strat plus, les paul std, into either a crate VC30 or a Marshall JTM60. (That's all I've had time to test with anyway, but I doubt it's gonna be a problem with my archtops) the delays are fairly clean and well defined. Some of the preset patches (that I wouldn't use anyway) a bit noisey.

I can't see what could go drastically wrong with it. But I'd probably have one of my old delay pedals in my cable/junk case anyway.

Given all I wanted was to replace an old Rack mount Digitech that was giving me constant headroom problems, I'd say this 508 is a decent pickup. I'm not crazy bout a floor pedal, but as long as I can keep it in the fx loop, and not be draging it all over the floor on a gig, I guess it's a compromise.. At least it's a better match than my dsp128+ has been...

Navigating linearly through the patches is somewhat difficult-- users of the 500 series that have this difficulty should turn the Direct Load feature off so you can switch without changing the effect until you confirm it. In edit mode you can enable the Hold feature for sampling and looping, or the Tap feature to adjust the delay time according to the tempo you're playing.

Actually, i use the 508 with a didjeridu, a rhythmic woodwind from Australia. Sound quality is excellent, although most patches intentionally degrade the sound by default as the echo fades. The 4 second delay is amazing when used with the Hold feature, I can layer rhythm upon rhythm indefinitely.

This thing takes a severe beating and it always comes through.

All the 500's don't seem to require technical support because it's really well built.

The didjeridu is a rhythmical instrument, not a melodic instrument, so the 508 delay is great for layering rhythms to simulate a multi-piece rhythm section.