Community preset · Tone Terminal

Slightly Glitchy Reverse Delay

By adamguitar23

This is the purest expression of the reverse delay concept — nothing added, nothing colored, just stacked backward echoes dissolving one into the next. BALANCE at 3 is as close to pure reverse as you can get without silencing the voice entirely. There is no forward echo, no octave, no sequencing. Every repeat you hear is the original note played backward, then backward again slightly quieter, then again, trailing off into the distance. The effect is almost subtractive — notes vanish upward into a reverse swell rather than decaying forward. FEEDBACK at 72 is the heart of this patch. High enough that you get four to six clearly audible reverse repeats before they fade into the noise floor, but well short of the infinite territory that would cause buildup and smearing. Each successive repeat is naturally lower in volume than the one before — the feedback path attenuates with each pass. You get the long ghost trail without the sound ever getting denser or louder over time. It fades. Always fades. TIME at 105 is long — close to 3 seconds per cycle. This is what gives each reverse echo room to fully unfurl. A short reverse echo sounds like a glitch or effect. A long one sounds like memory. At this TIME, the backward swell builds slowly, peaks, and then the next repeat begins before it fully disappears, creating a chain of overlapping ghosts each slightly dimmer than the last. OFFSET at 0 is non-negotiable here. All voices share the same timing so they stack perfectly on top of one another. Any offset would introduce forward or octave voices at different intervals, breaking the pure reverse chain. FILTER at 57 — barely below noon. Just enough low-pass softening to take the edge off the high frequencies in the repeats. Not dark, not bright. The echoes sound like they are made of the same material as the original note, just older. More distant. No modulation. This was a deliberate choice. Vibrato or chorus would add movement and interest to the echoes, but this sound is about stillness and decay. The reverse playback itself creates all the motion needed — adding modulation would shift the feeling from haunting to lush, which is a different patch entirely. TRAILS on so the ghost follows you through the bypass. When you stop playing, the echoes continue their slow fade rather than cutting abruptly. Performance tips: Let notes fully ring. Single notes, sustained chords, slow melodic phrases — all work beautifully. Fast playing muddies the reverse trail because new notes interrupt the swell of the previous ones before they peak. The sweet spot is playing a note, waiting for the reverse swell to crest, then playing the next. Try pushing FEEDBACK toward 90 or 95 for an even longer, denser ghost trail that borders on infinite — it will build very slowly, almost imperceptibly, and feel like the room itself is remembering your notes. Pull FEEDBACK below 50 for just two or three crisp reverse ghosts that fade quickly and cleanly. The ghost lives in the FEEDBACK knob.