Van Halen Roland SDE-3000 Setup

[chrisom]

The new Guitar World shows Ed's Left and Right cabinet delay settings as 398 milliseconds and 798 milliseconds, with each SDE-3000 placed in series with the Left and Right outputs of his Lexicon PCM unit. Are these delay time settings something new, or what he has used in the past in his classic post-Echoplex live setup?

[Damian The Man]

The most popular setting everyone knows is ~250/500 ms.
Maybe this one is particular for Unchained.

[dirtycooter]

His times are longer than what people thought. I been usin 300+600 myself. I believe one side is phase inverted which is not mentioned and helps put it in a better mix dimension. Reversing one side makes it much more 3D sounding-spreading seemingly beyond a simple stereo image. Its just about adding ambience subtley and very lightly-just enough to widen and make it deeper sounding without cluttering up.
One big disappointment was the lack of the PCM70 settings. Obviously this would be louder and wetter than the sde mixes. The settings for the 70? That woulda been nice but leave it to a mag writer to get it right the first time
The key to the sde's and pcm70 is they have analog mixers built into them-that saves having to use outboard analog mixer plus eliminates digital latency on the dry sound-total genius. My pcm80 though does not have the analog dry thru path like the 70 even though its an upgrade to the 70 in some of the fx and resolution.

[sgill72]

Cathedral PCM70 setting is basically a multiband delay algorithm (double delay) with two delays (V1 and V2) set to 424ms, feedback to 12, 100% wet. I'm not 100 percent certain but I think that V1 is panned hard left and V2 is panned hard right. The unit in Ed's rack display read: "2.2 V2 DLY 424 MS."

[dirtycooter]

But.....
What is failed to be seen here is this simple fact.
Those settings seem pretty low on feedback. While the way it sounds is... Longer to the ear.
What if the sde's are on with this 424 setting on the pcm??
The pcm is first in chain, and basically the splitter yet seemingly not so stereo. It sounds like a long delay but still stereo sounding.
I think that when the pcm is kicked on its a long solid mono kinda image but then feeds the sde's at their different time settings a pseudo multi-tap delay feel. This is what I think is happening personally.
When he kicks on the pcm the sde's are already rolling their shpeal. So its a delay feeding another delay causing that... Chain reaction of multi-tap delayness we hear that sounds so spacey and big. Just a mono 424ms delay does not sound as huge as the same 424ms delay feeding a ping pong type setup on its own. Think....... Totally see it myself. Dry sparkin up some sde early but then boom, the loud 424ms delay, them boom, the original dry delay, and the delayed ping ponged 424ms delay.
Sounds like some sorta stacked delay ala The Edge type of thing but kept simple
I really think the ambience setting of the sde's is being played out yet again onnthese long pcm delays. Anyone who has stacked two delay pedals in series will see it. Now try stacking basically that first big long delay into a stereo imaged ping kinda delay. POOF! The WORLD!

[dirtycooter]

From what I gather... The pcm 70 is analog in/thru. You can mix in its digital fx via analog mixing thats an internal analog mixer in the 70's mix section. Sorta a bit like the rocktron units from the 80's. Same shit with the sde's in the analog mixing scheme of their digital fx being mixed inside the processor.
The pcm is mono in, stereo out in analog, and also in digital fx when they are switched on from the pcm. So the pcm is basically his signal splitter really to feed two seperate "mono only capable" sde's on each side. On or Off doesn't matter. When he switches on the long pcm delay its torquing up the sde's just like his dry tone, except the dry tone has a delay copy at about the same level of loudness from the pcm when he switches it on. Totally cool. Anyone get any of this shit?????
Zero latency and analog mixing are huge really. And combining two boxes-thinknof the sde's as one stereo in out processor here, and it all makes buku sense.

[Megaro]

I heard them live on the 2015 tour at the Red Rocks. I did not hear a prominent delay at all which is surprising given those very long delay settings. In fact, I do not recall really "hearing" any delay except when he would engage the PCM 70 for the long whammy dive effect or the Cathedral stuff. My guess is that this was his intent.

I am almost shocked at how much gain he uses on the red channel according to the article I do recall listening to his tone very closely at soundcheck and during the regular concert. I could tell when he engaged the red channel. I felt the distortion obscured some of the subtleties in his playing.

I was relieved to hear that he uses the chorus pedal on DDL. I remember listening to this very carefully and just swearing that I heard some faint chorusy stuff going on. It was very subtle, as was the octaver. I thought my ears were playing tricks on me !

Great article and observations from our members.

[dirtycooter]

In an arena it would be actually even more hard to hear the sde's subtleness of girth it gives.
I hear it on solos though. Not all the main riffs though. Its not on as much as one thinks. If you listen to the last live record you will hear it.
Mostly its dry, solos some sde thrown on.
The pcm long loud delay is the big psychidelic oblivion echo like in cathedral. You will hear him kick it on for big screaming dive bomb harmonics sometimes. Its actually really cool when you start pickin this stuff out of how where and when. Becomes perfectly clear after a while.
And yes.... The chorus is overlooked sooooo much on some of his stuff.

[dirtycooter]

Think of the delays as stompboxes.
Let first go into a delay pedal set for 400+ms. This will act as the PCM here in scheme. At about 50/50 mix so its loud delay repeats. If you look on some boss and other delay pedals they have left and right outputs. And even when the effect is off and the delay is not being used it still splits the output dry tone to both sides of the output. In bypass or not. Its not only a delay but a signal splitter.
Now take each of these outputs and put them into a boss dd3 on each side. One dd3 is set to exactly double the time of the other. Like 300+600 or 250+500 or 400+800ms. Each dd3 then goes to their respective side of the stereo amp left or right.
So thats the total fx chain right there but its done post amp not in front of the amp input.
Whats huge though and probably why he sticks with these specific delays so much too is the simple fact they are one of the few that have actual analog mixers built in. I think only the PCM70 is the only Lex to still have this at this point in time that came out back then-after that Lex did not add this analog mixer anymore to the 80, 81, 90, 91 etc. Its completely absent. You have to have an outboard analog mixer or make sure all of your tone goes through the analog to digital conversion and back again. The 70 is mono in and stereo out. All PCM's after this are stereo in and out capable though which I can still feed my 80 mono or stereo input. Doesn't matter unless your feeding the 80 a stereo chorus or something then its pretty useful in that application.
The SDE's offer this capability as well and have analog mixed output. But are basically mono in and out-hence why he needs one for each side.
The 70 is said to have a specific character aside from later Lex's. And the Sde's are still up there tonewise against some of the all time best delays ever to this day.
So if you look at it its not much at all different from Satriani's delay stacking scheme of serial delay pedals he always uses. But Eds two sounds are the ping pong delay for dimension and space and width and the psycho long loud echo and thats when the pcm is thrown on there. Thats the box doin the deep space shtick.
Adding in his Eventide required an analog mixed stereo path of mixed dry and eventide in stereo, and now I can definitly see there was also a second output of this sound summed together on a mono send that fed all of the above into the pcm's mono input which returned again in stereo from each SDE and out along side the already stereo pitch shifted stereotized main sound.

[dirtycooter]

I learned alot about the PCM from Italoop on Huge Racks Inc. Check out Italo DeAngelis sound clips of all these big boy fx boxes on his clips. Worth the reading if you want to learn more on these boxes and the sound clips will definitly show you the flavor and power of alot of these boxes. Its pretty cool.

[502_6speed]

What is the difference between the PCM70 V2.0 vs V3.0?