About Pricing Free Tools START FREE TRIAL Login
Worship Delay Types

We're committed to resourcing worship leaders and teams and believe that the quality of our worship should never be defined by what we lack. We've got free audio, video and written content to help you learn new skills.

 

 

Explore different types of delay sounds & settings for your favorite worship songs.


What's In This Session?
  • Introduction (0:00)

  • Strymon Timeline (0:16)

  • Dotted Eighth Delay (0:43)

  • Examples (1:13)

  • Quarter Note & Dotted Eighth Delay / Strymon El Capistan (2:49)

  • Examples (3:18)

  • Quarter Note Delay (4:45)

  • Examples (5:30)

  • Recap (6:10)

The Full Transcript
"All right, so today I'm just gonna be talking about how I use delay on worship on weekends weekend services, and some settings and presets that are really useful to me. I have a couple go to delays that kind of do different things. The first one is the Timeline, which is essentially a digital delay but it also does some some tape settings and some analog type settings too. But I mainly use a timeline if I'm going to I need a very specific BPM, or a very specific delay, and I want to, especially if I want to save and recall any songs. I can store entire songs in there. So, just as an example, very common delay used in worship is dotted 8th, which is made popular by bands like U2 in the 80s and 90s, and it's still going strong today. This is just an example of dotted 8th delay. I'm pretty heavy in the mix, so you can hear the repeats quite well, and also have some Reverb and a little bit of Drive as well, but here we go. So with this, I'm just using the repeats and kind of the balance-y to delay to it just affects my playing. So I’m not going to be too busy, I'm gonna let it repeat, and then kind of enter; might start picking again around the note, since the delay is so heavy in the mix, you don't want to get too busy; it starts getting kind of washy, so you just want to play with the delay when it's just high in the mix. So again, if you're playing a chord - I just kind of play around the repeats and just try to stay out of the way. Another really common delay is combining a quarter note and a dotted eighth, which I'll demonstrate on the El Capistan by Strymon. It’s a tape delay, but you can use tap tempo. Tap tempo is very useful if you don't have a digital read unit, where you can store bpms but you still want to be in time with the song. That's a great way to go, too. So you can just tap it in with the tempo of the song. So this would be an example of that - so I'll just pick a tempo here. So the tape delay stays out of the way a little bit more. The repeats aren't as heavy, so you can do a little bit more strumming work and you can be a little bit busier and it'll stay out of the way, especially if you back off the mix level of a delay like that, the repeats won't get in the way as much. So that was a combined delay, so it was quarter and dotted eighth. So it has the dotted eighth and a quarter just kind of unison. Another one that's probably the third most common delay is just a straight quarter note, especially if you're just playing straight eighth notes, quarter notes - it just really fattens up the notes and gives you just more body to work with. And with quarter notes, you have to be kind of careful with how you play because again, it can get kind of messy if you play maybe a little bit too percussively. You kind of have to play with the delay, you have to kind of stay within the bounds of the repeats. And especially with the tempo, depending on how high you set the mix, you just want to kind of stay with the delay. So here is an example of that. Okay, so just to recap, the three most comment delays used in worship music are dotted eighth, which sounds like this; straight quarter note, which would be like this; and then a dotted eighth and a quarter combined, which would be like this."

Close