Delay

A delay pedal repeats the signal it receives after a set amount of time, once or in a decaying series of echoes, and everything that happens before it in the chain is what gets repeated. That single fact is the whole reason its placement matters as much as it does: a delay is not adding a sound of its own so much as it is replaying whatever sound reaches it.

The types in this family

• Delay (rank 100): Delay repeats a signal that already has its gain and its modulation, so the repeats carry the sound actually played.

Where it sits in the chain, and why

Delay sits after the modulation block, so the repeats carry the gain, tone shaping and modulation already applied to the original note rather than an unprocessed one. Reversing that order — putting delay before modulation — means the repeats themselves get modulated independently of the original note, which is occasionally used deliberately for a specific washy effect but is a departure from the order most boards default to. Delay before reverb, rather than after, is the standard relationship between the two time-based effects — see the reverb family’s own page for why the order between them matters.

Power notes

Delay is one of the more power-hungry pedal families on a typical board: producing a repeating, decaying echo — especially a long or multi-tap one — usually takes real digital signal processing, and many delay pedals draw meaningfully more current than a simple analog effect. This family is also one of the more common candidates for a dedicated isolated output, since a shared, noisy ground is more audible in a repeating echo than in a single pass through a distortion pedal. Confirm the actual draw from the pedal’s documentation rather than assuming a delay is "normal" by some average.

General guidance for the family, never a specification for any individual pedal — always confirm voltage, polarity, current draw and isolation from the maker’s own documentation before wiring a real board.

Every rank and reason above is quoted straight from pedal-chain-planner.js's PEDAL_TYPES — the same taxonomy this site's chain planner runs and docs/gearwarrior-pedals-contract.md documents. No second table.