If you’re looking for the pinnacle of analog delay goodness at an absolute steal of a price, your wallet has officially met its match.

MXR combines everything we loved about the previous two Carbon Copy pedals and gives them an upgrade and a half. Let’s get to the details.

Tone:

The tone is identical to the previous two versions – the Carbon Copy and the Carbon Copy Bright – even providing you with a switch to toggle between the two sounds.

In all honesty, that is truly enough of a reason to buy this pedal. You get double the pedal while only paying about 30% more. But I digress…

Should you have missed our previous two reviews, the Carbon Copy has a beautiful warm, lush analog delay sound that has become the best-selling analog delay pedal of all time, and for good reason.

Its unique color and texture add depth to your sound without clouding your playing. The repeats are thick and mellow sounding, with the Mod button adding its famous modulation to the repeats without applying it to your dry signal.

The modulation adds movement and shimmer to the delay, making for great ambient and experimental tones, but even without it engaged it’s absolutely lovely, creating sounds you just want to fall into and swim through.

Features:

This is where the new updates begin…

MXR has smashed their two Carbon Copy versions into a single enclosure with a toggle switch allowing you to access both flavors at a moment’s notice. However much of a selling feature that may be, they didn’t stop there.

They’ve taken the all-analog tone and augmented it with digital controls for controlling your delay signal. The first addition is a tap-tempo footswitch that lets you tap the speed of your song with your foot and the delay pedal will be perfectly in time.

The second addition is the addition of the TAP DIV button, which lets you set the rhythmic value of your delay. If can be a standard quarter note (delay repeats on every beat), eighth note (twice per beat), dotted-eighth (syncopated sound, used by U2’s “The Edge” to simulate multiple instruments), and much more.

The flexibility offered in these controls makes it an entirely new pedal, and feels just like operating a digital delay. No more bending over to change the speed or rhythmic subdivision, you can let your feet do it for you.

Now to be fair you’ll still be tweaking knobs, but this time it’ll be for fun, not the necessity.

The MXR team have added two knobs to the Carbon Copy Deluxe: Speed and Width. These two controls impact the modulation side of the unit only, allowing you to tweak them much like a chorus pedal. Think of it like having a chorus pedal inside your delay pedal, but the chorus only impacts the repeats.

You can take the built-in modulation as is, or you can go wild with warbled, vintage-vinyl sounds that stretch your repeats in every direction. You can even crank the speed to create what sounds like a leslie speaker going crazy on the delay signal.

 

An external expression control is also available, letting you plug in any controller to manipulate the sound of the delay in real-time, allowing you to save two different delay presets and blend between them at will. This is absolutely INSANE for an analog delay pedal.

Oh, and that’s just the controls on the outside.

Inside the pedal, you’ve got a switch for putting the pedal before the amp or in the effects loop, as well as a brilliant addition: a dry kill. You can kill your dry signal entirely so that the pedal only outputs the delay repeats – a fantastic tool for studio use.

It still has the same great features of the previous generation too: true bypass switching, all-analog tone, and astounding build quality.

All that being said, there is one final reason we are giving this pedal a perfect review: delay time.

In our previous reviews, we noted that – while incredible to the ear and versatile to the mind – the pedals didn’t have a very long delay time, around 800ms. MXR have once again outdone themselves by giving us 1.2 seconds of delay time! Our only nitpick is now much, much smaller of a problem.

Final Thoughts:

Just when you think MXR couldn’t do it any better, they do. They were not satisfied with “best-selling analog delay of all time,” they needed it to be even better, and that’s why we respect, admire, and praise MXR for all their incredible work and dedication to their craft.

This pedal is a 10/10. MXR, we salute you.

About The Author