TC Electronic Flashback Triple Delay

Housed in TC’s modern and easily recognizable X4 body (also used in their new Ditto X4 Looper), the Triple Delay boasts a tour-worthy metal chassis with a sexy polished-sparkle blue finish and two-tone screen-printed face featuring a humorously appropriate crown one could assume signifies its regal TC bloodline with three tips representing the three simultaneous delays you can use at once. All four switches (three for each delay engine, one for tap tempo) are soft touch for easy toggling and the knobs are responsive and smooth. There are also two toggle switches between the knobs that control which delay engine you’re editing when you tweak the parameters, and whether the delays are in Serial or Parallel, respectively.

The 5 knobs on the Triple delay are as follows, from left to right:

Delay Type: Much like the Flashback X4, the Triple Delay comes equipped with 12 factory delay types: Tape, Tube, Space, Analog, Analog w/Modulation, Reverse, Dynamic, 2290, 2290 w/ Modulation, Slapback, Lo-Fi and Ping-Pong. You also have the option of setting up a custom TonePrint in the 4 “TP” slots. We’ll discuss this more later.

Time: This knob controls your delay rate and overrides the tap tempo. The max delay time is 7 seconds.

Repeats: Controls how long the delay goes on. At its extremes it can be one repeat or infinity, and it will self-oscillate when the delay rate is short enough to overlap, but I noticed that you don’t get the iconic analog delay pitch-shifting effect when you turn the time knob clockwise on any of the factory presets.

Mix: This knob determines how much of your analog signal comes through proportionally to the affected signal. The beauty of it is how little it affects the actual dry signal as it’s turned further clockwise thanks to TC’s design choice to include analog-dry-through: your guitar’s inherent tone is only accented by the Triple, not overcome by it.

Subdivision: This parameter determines the rhythm of the delay time- the options range from dotted quarter notes to alternating dotted eighth and sixteenth notes.