Line 6 DL-4 Delay

History:

Marcus Ryle, Susan Wolf, and Michel Doidic founded Line 6 in California in 1996. Ryle was a classically trained pianist and played in bands, and at 19 he met synthesizer pioneer Tom Oberhiem. In 1980 he started working at Oberheim and stayed there for 5 years along with Wolf (former bandmate) and Doidic (fellow engineer). They all left to start a company that made digital products for other companies, most notably the Alesis ADAT.

When they formed Line 6 in 1996, the goal was to make guitar amps and effects that digitally model actual legendary analog pieces of gear, so guitarists could quickly and easily dial up inspiring tones. The Line 6 Pod became their first big hit in 1998, simulating guitar amps, cabs, and effects for easy guitar recording. Then in 1999 they introduced their first effects modeling pedals: The blue MM-4 Modulation Modeler and the green DL-4 Delay Modeler.

The MM-4 and the DL-4, along with the purple FM-4 Filter Modeler released in 2001, became necessary pieces of gear for session and live guitar players. The amount of sounds available in these three pedals were unrivaled by other pedalboard based units, and the sounds were high enough quality to be usable on major recordings and tours.

The algorithms making these sounds were also put into the ToneCore series pedals around 2005. ToneCore pedals were roughly the size and shape of normal stompboxes and had a limited palette of the same sounds from the original larger series of pedals. The ToneCore series did not have great staying power, however, and did not unseat the DL-4, MM-4, and FM-4 from Line 6’s roster.

In 2009, Line 6 created the M13, a huge pedal with lots of footswitches that had all of the sounds from Line 6’s previous effect pedals including the DL-4, MM-4, FM-4, DM-4 Distortion Modeler, and VerbZilla. This product generated intrigue but was simply too large to fit on pedalboards. The following year Line 6 released the M9, a multi effects unit with all of the same sounds as the M13 but in a box about the size of the DL-4. The M9 was an instant hit and within a few years it had obsoleted all prior Line 6 effects pedals, and they were discontinued in favor of the M9.

The one exception to this is the DL-4 itself. Though multiple generations of Line 6 Effects pedals have built upon what the DL-4 started, Line 6 still produces DL-4s as of 2020. A Line 6 developer once said of the DL-4’s continued presence in the Line 6 roster of products, “It’s our tubescreamer”.

One intersting note about the DL-4’s development is that Jeorge Tripps was brought on to help design the -4 series of pedals. Tripps was the founder of Way Huge Electronics, known for their many overdrives and the rare and beloved Way Huge Aqua Puss delay pedal. he would go on to work for Dunlop and design the MXR Carbon Copy analog delay. Between the Aqua Puss, DL-4 (later becoming the M9 and HX Stomp), and Carbon Copy, Jeorge Tripps is responsible for a substantial amount of delay sounds on records and tours since the mid ’90s.

Use:

J.T. used the DL-4 in sessions from the early ’00s until he had his Trailer Trash board made in 2009. He had a pedalboard with a volume pedal and a tuner on it, and would bring a tupperware bin full of pedals. Whenever he needed a pedal, he would take it out of the tupperware bin, put it on the board, hook up power and plug it into the signal chain. At that time, the advantages of the DL-4 for a session player were 1) tap tempo, 2) good sounds, and 3) creative sounds.

1) Tap Tempo
Delay is an effect that repeats your sound. It’s also known as echo. It tends to sound more musical if the delay repeats happen with the beat of the music. On analog and earlier digital pedals, a guitarist would have to adjust the delay time knob with careful precision to get repeats that synced with the tempo of the music. In 1995, Boss released the DD-5 stompbox, which had a tap tempo input jack on the right side of the pedal. A guitarist could connect a footswitch like the Boss FS-5U and tap the footswitch along with the beat of the music, and the delay time would match the amount of time in between taps, making the delay sync up with the music. The Line 6 DL-4 was innovative by putting the tap switch right in the pedal, so no other gear was needed, making it simple to use. There was also a “Rhythmic Delay” mode that allowed the player to tap normal quarter notes but select what kind of note the delay time should be (quarter/8th/16th notes and their triplets).

2) Good Sounds
In the late ’90s and early ’00s, there were different beloved flavors of delay that came from different pieces of gear. The earliest tube tape echo units like the Echoplex EP-1 were known for their warmth and slight warble to the delayed notes. The later solid state tape echos like the Echoplex EP-3 had that same warble but sounded more clear. The Roland Space Echo had multiple adjustable heads that allowed multiple differently timed delays at once. The early analog stompboxes like the Boss DM-2 had a warm repeat sound. The Electro-Harmonix Deluxe Memory Man had a similar warm sound with the added option of purposeful warble to mimic tape delays. The early digital delays of the ’80s like the Boss DD-2 had a limited bit depth that caused low resolution repeats that many musicians thought sounded good, and later digital delay pedals with higher bit rates sounded 100% pristine. The DL-4 digitally recreated all of these sounds. Owning all of the original delay machines would be expensive, take up lots of space, require constant maintenance, and be inconvenient to integrate into the signal chain quickly. The DL-4 was relatively inexpensive at around $250, the sounds did not change due to lack of maintenance like tape units, it fit on a pedalboard and only required the press of a button to put delay in the signal chain, and only required the turn of a knob to change to any of these delay sounds. 20 years later we take these things for granted in any digital delay pedal, but when the DL-4 was new it was groundbreaking.

3) Creative Sounds
Along with the tried-and-true methods of getting good tone, session players often look for something interesting and ear catching. The DL-4 had a few of these tricks up its sleeve as well. Along with the “Tweak” and “Tweez” knobs that could send any of the more conventional modes into something unique sounding, there were some modes that automatically made something that normal delay pedals couldn’t give. The “Sweep Echo” mode puts a moving EQ sweep on the delayed sound, like a phaser or a wah. J.T. used the Sweep Echo mode of his DL-4 in one of the isolated guitar tracks from 2009 on this site. The “Reverse” mode repeats the guitar sounds in reverse, and to put it bluntly, it sounds crazy. The “Auto-Volume Echo” mode creates automatic volume swells from the player’s chords and notes.

For an easy and comprehensive guide to the DL-4 and its sounds, follow this link to the official Pilot’s Handbook from Line 6.

Specs:

Width: 23″
Length: 6.6″
Height: 2.9″
Power: Line 6 sold the DL-4 and other -4 series pedals with the same power supply their Pod, which took AC power. This is very strange for guitar pedals. But there are other options, as Bob Weil from Truetone power supplies states on their site:
“Well, it does say “9VAC 1200mA” on the back of the Line 6 pedals, but they don’t really use that. That is simply the output rating of the POD adapter which the modeling pedals also use. If you think about it, the Line 6 pedals take batteries, don’t they? Batteries are DC, not AC, so the pedals must really run on DC voltage. So how do they work with a 9VAC POD adapter? The modeling pedals have a bridge rectifier at the power input jack which immediately converts AC to DC where the adapter plugs in. And regarding the 1200mA of current the pedals are supposedly using, it’s really more in the range of 350mA. That’s still more than an average adapter can handle, but the 1 SPOT can handle two Line 6 pedals and have plenty of juice left over for several ordinary stomp boxes. Why Line 6 didn’t come out with a separate adapter for the modeling pedals, I don’t know, but the 1 SPOT makes an excellent alternative to the bulky single-purpose POD adapter.”

The DL-4 initially had the old style Line 6 logo embossed in the green housing. Starting around 2005 Line 6 changed the logo to a black and grey modern logo, and it has been the same since. J.T.’s DL-4 was the earlier kind with the embossed logo, made between 1999-2004. It is also present in a picture from 2004, confirming that he owned it by that point.