Playing with delay feedback without killing your audience or bandmates

Is there a way to make the delay go crazy without ripping people’s heads off with volume?

At a particular point in a performance, I want to crank up the feedback (in relation to saturation) and mess with delay time to get crazy sounds happening. On most digital delays, there’s a limiter at some point, but on the A4 the delay sound is MUCH more powerful and quickly becomes too loud. Even with performance controls where the amounts are limited, I find any runaway feedback eventually leads to a volume explosion.

I can of course limit the amount of feedback to control the volume, but what I’m trying to do it make it go crazy and then hit “reset.” Surely someone else has figured out a way to do this.

Sticking to a sweet spot for feedback and play with the delay send only?

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Reload the kit?

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Reload ends the delay insanity, so that comes later. Delay send ditto doesn’t allow for things to go nuts. I’m not sure why Elektron didn’t include some kind of limiter options for runaway feedback loudness.

I don’t have an A4 so don’t know how the macros work but could you set the volume to turn down at the same time? That’s what I do on my AR.

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The old school method was to ride the depth and feedback knobs, especially feedback. You let it start to go then rein it in with the feedback, then go again. Not got my A4K to hand but don’t you have an encoder for each? Push and turn for big jumps?

Once accidentally triggered an insane delay on bass guitar while playing live in an indie band for a headphone disco at a festival event. It crept up on us all.
Nearly killed everyone including myself.
Was kind of fun.

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All this talk and I have the inkling now to record and layer feedback into chord samples. Love feedback.

I’ll usually have macros set up for delay feedback and filters.
Macros are set to bipolar mode, so I can always go back to 0 (=safe space).

The filters in the delay line do a great job at controlling the chaos imho.

Add post distortion, it acts as a compressor! :smile:
And seriously, why not a compressor/limiter after.

Definitely! And the overdrive setting doesn’t help for harsh feedback!

Experiencing some random delays with feedback I used to place some trigs reducing feedback…

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So as @xidnpnlss and @Schnork mentioned, I think a perf macro for delay is the best solution, crazy delay under control (feedback, overdrive, filter settings, volume).

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