There’s a reason so many mixers still reach for an old bucket brigade delay pedal instead of a pristine digital one. The repeats drift a little, the top end softens, and every echo feels slightly different from the one before. Like with many early effects, that imperfection is exactly what makes a track feel alive. The trouble is that real BBD hardware is scarce, fragile, and expensive when you can find it. The new BBDelay from PSP Audioware solves that problem by modeling the circuitry behind a legendary 1980s BBD unitm and then pushing well past what the original hardware could do.
You’re probably thinking, “What exactly is a ‘bucket brigade delay’.
A bucket brigade delay (BBD) is an all-analog electronic circuit that delays an audio signal by passing discrete electrical charges sequentially through a long line of tiny capacitors. Named after firefighters passing water buckets in a line, it uses clock pulses to shift the audio sample down the chain.
Although no one realized it at the time, one of the things that we eventually came to love about these devices is that the frequency response degrades as it passes through each capacitor, giving it a distinct ‘vintage’ sound. Examples include the Electro-Harmonix Memory Man, Eventide DDL 1745, Lexicon Prime time Model 93, and the AMS DMX 15-80.
Modeling The Circuitry, Not Just The Delay
As for PSP’s take on this vintage device, most delay plugins simulate the sound of a bucket brigade device by shaping the frequency response and calling it a day.
BBDelay goes deeper by modeling the actual BBD chips along with the compander circuitry that surrounded them, which is where a lot of the vintage character actually lives. That means the plugin can reproduce the subtle instability, tone shifts, and companding artifacts that gave the original hardware its reputation, all while running as a modern 64-bit plugin with zero added latency on the dry signal.
You get delay times up to 800 milliseconds, or double that in an extended mode, along with Mono, Dual Mono, Ping-Pong, and Reverb modes for building anything from a simple slapback to a dense wash of ambience.
Delay speed can be dialed in smoothly like an analog unit, or locked to tempo, and four modulation waveforms add movement to the repeats without turning them to mush.
Not Built For Nostalgia
Where BBDelay separates itself from a straight recreation is in the extra processing PSP built into the feedback path.
A built-in transient shaper lets you control the attack of each repeat, while a ducker and gate open up rhythmic and performance-friendly effects that a vintage unit was never designed for.
Three stages of analog-style saturation add grit when you want it, and high-pass, low-pass, and resonant tone controls inside the feedback loop let you tighten or completely reshape the character of the decay.
Add in adjustable BBD chip spread for stereo width and a deep preset browser with A/B comparison and Favorites, and you have a delay that covers everything from vintage slapback to fully experimental soundscapes.
BBDelay is available now for AAX, AU, VST, and VST3 on both Mac and PC, with a 30-day trial so you can hear it on your own material first. Introductory pricing is $69 through August 10, after which it moves to its regular price of $99.
You can find out more here, or watch the video below.
