Obscura Delay Invites Weirdness With Vintage Sounding Delays and Warped Modulations

Obscure. Unknown. Different. All words that can be used to accurately describe Digitech’s Obscura delay pedal. On the company’s site this effect is branded as an altered delay pedal, and I found this to be an appropriate description based on my experience playing it. The Obscura is extremely diverse and features four different types of delays. This pedal also comes in a compact package despite all of the different options allowing for big savings on pedal board real estate. Quite literally on top of this, the sound sculpting controls on this effect are stacked to allow for this design. Without further ado and hopefully without any more terrible jokes let’s dive into the Obscura.

There are a lot of different ways to craft your delay with this pedal, and as a result there are number of different controls at your disposal. Level controls the volume of the wet signal. Time and repeats control the length and frequency of the delay modulations, respectively. You can distort, dampen and decay your delays with the tone and degrade controls. Time and repeats as well as tone and degrade are stacked on top of each other making the compact compact nature of this pedal possible. As I mentioned the Obscura also features four different types of delays. Analog replicates vintage delay style devices. Tape gives you an echoey delay style. Lo-fi reduces the depth of the effect to give you old school 8 bit delay signals. Reverse, the delay type that most intrigued me, plays the repeats you create backwards to create a warbly, trippy sound.

If you’re still with me after all of that then let’s get to what it was actually like playing on this. I played this effect on a VOX combo amp, and I had a really fun time doing so. This pedal is a great one for experimenters, and would suit those looking for inspiration from weird, modulated sounds. The analog delay works very well for this, and I found that I was able to get some really strange modulations out of it when I turned up the repeat knob. Tape didn’t make too much of an impression on me, but I had a lot of fun with the lo-fi delay type. It almost sounded like an old stereo, and I could hear subtle crackling that reminded me of a needle gliding across a record. Reverse was definitely the most interesting delay type in my opinion. The reversed repeats sounded almost like a theremin on high notes, and I was mesmerized by the synth-like quality that this setting gave to the notes I played. The only thing I could really find to complain about with the way this effect played was the fact that switching to a new delay mode took a few seconds kick in. This could be a concern for using it live. Considering how much is packed into this one small box though I would say this is a minor complaint.

On top of everything I just talked about the Obscura features a tap tempo mode which is extremely useful for setting up a specific timed delay. Honestly, it’s kind of amazing how much this pedal can do, and it only costs $150. Most higher-end delays are going to land right around that price point, and they aren’t going to be able to do as much as this one can. The one issue with this effect though is it’s greatest selling point, and that is the amount of things that it does. If you were using this effect at a show it could be easy for some to become lost in the amount of options available to them, and could end up being more troublesome than valuable. In fact I would recommend watching some demos of this one as well as playing it yourself to get the full impact, because it would be hard to get a true feeling and understanding of this effect just from reading about it. With all of that aside I truly think this is one of the most unique delay pedals I’ve tried. This little effect is a powerhouse that provides every delay customization control you could need in a small effect, and it provides a much more lo-fi, vintage sound than what most other stomp boxes of its type normally do. It really fulfills a very specific niche, and it really exemplifies the depth of diversity in the effects pedal market. If you want to get weird and really warp the delays you are creating then this might be the delay pedal for you.