Pete puts the new pedal through its myriad paces, and also goes deep with designer Kevin Suhr
We all know that guitar ace, in-demand session player and popular YouTuber Pete Thorn knows his stuff when it comes to gear. So when Pete has something to say, we listen.
“I’m going to make a bold statement,” Pete begins. “I think this is the finest analog delay that has ever been produced.”
As for what he's basing this opinion on?
“I’m basing it, first of all, on the way it sounds,” Pete says, “It sounds unbelievable – at least equal to, if not better than, any other analog delay I’ve ever played.”
(Image credit: Suhr)
The Suhr Discovery, in his estimation, has “more headroom and more fidelity, and yet if you want to make it sound super dark and murky and crazy and modulated you can do all that stuff too. But it doesn’t have any of the unpleasant artifacts that a lot of analog delay pedals I’ve played before have.”
For those not in the know, the Suhr Discovery is built around a core of four reissued MN3005 Bucket Brigade chips, and teams the analog circuit with a wide array of control – the sort more commonly associated with digital delays.
Delay times range from 40 to 1,100ms (expandable to 17ms-2000ms), and are adjustable via mix, time, regen, lo cut and hi cut controls, while modulation is tweaked via speed and depth knobs.
For more radical modulation sounds, Suhr also promises triangle, sine and square waveforms.
Sounds can be stored into 127 preset slots, while delay times can be set using the onboard tap tempo footswitch, and further refined using a division button.
Additionally, the Discovery is controllable using an expression pedal, which can be mapped to any parameter and stored per preset, as well as via MIDI, with the ability to send program changes to other MIDI-compatible pedals.
Other features include a soft clipping limiter, a kill dry mode for parallel effects loops, switchable true or buffered bypass and more.
That’s a whole lot of functionality, and to hear how it can be harnessed to create some of the more incredible analog delays going, check out Pete’s extensive overview above.
As a bonus, he even wrangles an extensive interview with Kevin Suhr himself, “so you can hear right from the mind of the designer what he was thinking when he designed this thing,” Pete says.
To be sure, Pete has the Discovery Analog Delay covered. But to find out even more for yourself, head to Suhr.
Rich is the co-author of the best-selling Nöthin' But a Good Time: The Uncensored History of the '80s Hard Rock Explosion. He is also a recording and performing musician, and a former editor of Guitar World magazine and executive editor of Guitar Aficionado magazine. He has authored several additional books, among them Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck, the companion to the documentary of the same name.
