I love delays. To the point where I often think I put far too much of them in my productions, but I just can’t help it.
For years, my standard Ableton default template has had the Arturia Delay Tape-201 and Brigade loaded up as permanent sends on every new project. Way back in the day, OhmBoyz was my absolute favourite plugin. Recently, I have started swapping out the Arturia Tape for Softube’s Tape Echoes (though I still miss the built-in modulation of the Arturia version). In my software modular setups, running Chronoblob inside VCV Rack allows for absolutely crazy modulation and filtering of the delay line within the repeats themselves.
Software is infinitely capable. But isn’t it ironic? Just like modern digital photography and video, where we spend massive amounts of time adding grain and halation to get that “film” look, we spend a huge amount of time and processing power trying to get digital audio to sound analogue. Or, more specifically, to feel analogue. We want it to feel alive, unpredictable, and beautifully imperfect.
Recording live automation into Ableton with the Push 2 gets me most of the way there. But despite what we get sold by software companies, for me at least, nothing compares to being able to grab a physical knob on a physical box and record myself “playing” the feedback live.
I want it to get out of control. That is exactly what I am looking for.
This craving for physical chaos is exactly why I recently added a new piece of hardware to the studio desk: the Walrus Audio Meraki.
It is a true stereo, fully analogue delay pedal. It is also ridiculously expensive. But instead of doing a standard, generic product review running through the knob functions and the I/O, I want to talk about why a pedal like this even exists, and why it commands such a premium in a world where you can download a flawless digital delay VST for free.
To understand the Meraki, you have to understand the technology beating inside it. You have to understand a piece of audio architecture that was invented over fifty years ago, and why electronic music producers have been obsessively abusing it ever since.
We have to talk about the Bucket Brigade.
The Physics of the Bucket
In the modern digital era, creating a delay is easy. Audio goes into an analogue-to-digital converter, gets written into a RAM buffer as ones and zeros, waits for a predetermined amount of time, and is read back out perfectly intact. It is a pristine, lossless clone of the original signal.
In the late 1960s, this was impossible. If you wanted a delay, you used magnetic tape. While machines like the Roland Space Echo eventually dominated the consumer market, the true foundation of the sound was actually rooted in standard studio tape machines—like the legendary Studer A80. These giant reel-to-reels were never originally intended to be used as delay lines. However, engineers realised that by manipulating the variable tape speed (vamping) and routing the playback head output back into the mixing console’s auxiliary sends, they could turn a pristine recording device into a chaotic dub-monster.
It sounded incredible, but those tape machines were massive, required constant maintenance, and were entirely impractical for a guitarist on stage.
In 1969, two engineers at Philips Research Labs (F. Sangster and K. Teer) invented a solid-state alternative: the Bucket Brigade Device (BBD).
A BBD chip is essentially a microscopic line of thousands of capacitors. Imagine a literal line of people, each holding a bucket. The first person fills their bucket with water (the audio signal) and pours it into the next person’s bucket. That person pours it into the next, and so on, down a line of 4096 people. The time it takes for the water to reach the end of the line is your delay time.
The Flaw is the Feature
Here is the crucial part of the physics: every single time the water is poured from one bucket to the next, a little bit spills.
In a BBD chip, as the analogue voltage passes through thousands of microscopic capacitors, the signal degrades. High frequencies are lost. A subtle, natural compression occurs. Furthermore, the chip is driven by a high-frequency clock signal, which introduces a high-pitched whine into the audio. To fix this, engineers place aggressive low-pass filters at the end of the circuit to chop off the clock noise, which further darkens the delayed signal.
By the time the audio comes out the other end of the BBD chip, it is murky, dark, and saturated.
From a pure, sterile engineering standpoint, the BBD chip is a flawed design. But musically, that flaw is the greatest feature ever invented. Because every successive repeat gets darker and more degraded, the echoes naturally sink to the back of the mix. They never fight with your dry, original signal. They just sit underneath it, creating a warm, thick, atmospheric bed of sound.
Digital delays are perfect, which means they often clash with the lead element. Analogue BBD delays are imperfect, which means they glue the track together.
The Synthesiser and the Pedal
Historically, pedals were designed for guitarists. You put them on the floor, stepped on them to turn them on, and forgot about them.
But electronic producers and synth players realised very early on that these pedals were actual instruments. We don’t put them on the floor; we put them on the studio desk right next to the mixer. We have been doing this for decades—from integrating them into live DJ sets to using them as dedicated outboard studio effects.
The true magic of a BBD analogue delay isn’t just the dark tone; it is the physical feedback loop.
Because it is an analogue circuit, if you turn the “Feedback” or “Repeats” knob up high enough, the pedal begins to feed back in on itself, pushing the BBD chips into self-oscillation. It creates a howling, chaotic, rhythmic wall of noise that you can physically “play” by riding the delay time knob. If you twist the time knob while audio is trapped in the buckets, the pitch physically warps and bends.
You cannot faithfully recreate the unpredictable, electrical chaos of an oscillating analogue delay with a mouse. That tactile interaction—riding the edge of runaway feedback on a physical knob—is the absolute foundation of genres like Dub Techno.
The Walrus Audio Meraki
This brings us to the Walrus Audio Meraki.
For decades, the holy grail of BBD chips was the Panasonic MN3005. It was famously used in the legendary Electro-Harmonix Deluxe Memory Man (a pedal I used to own, one of the millions of things I should never have sold, and heavily regret letting go of). Because they were complex to manufacture, they were eventually discontinued, making true analogue delays with long repeat times incredibly rare and expensive.
Recently, a company called Xvive started remanufacturing faithful clones of the MN3005, kicking off a renaissance in analogue pedal design. Walrus Audio took this renaissance and pushed it to its absolute architectural limit.
A standard analogue delay pedal usually has one, maybe two BBD chips inside it, giving you a mono delay of maybe 300 to 600 milliseconds.
The Meraki has eight MN3005 chips inside it.
Because they crammed so much bucket-brigade architecture under the hood, the Meraki is a true stereo delay (meaning the left and right channels are completely independent, preserving your stereo synth patches) with up to 1200 milliseconds of delay time. Building a true stereo analogue delay is notoriously difficult because you have perfectly matched chips on both sides so the timing and degradation sound cohesive.
Walrus succeeded brilliantly. The sound is thick, incredibly warm, and possesses that distinct, percussive “thump” on the repeats that you only get from pushing electricity through physical capacitors.
But what makes it a modern studio powerhouse is the digital brain controlling the analogue heart. It features tap tempo with subdivisions, MIDI control for syncing to Ableton’s master clock, and independent modulation controls to add a lush, chorusing seasick wobble to the repeats. It gives you the unpredictable, degraded warmth of 1970s analogue physics, with the precision of a 2024 digital workflow.
If you want a granular, knob-by-knob breakdown of these features, I highly recommend seeking out Ricky Tinez’s review on YouTube. That video is actually what originally piqued my interest in the Meraki. Ninety percent of pedal demos online are aimed at guitarists playing blues licks, which makes it incredibly difficult to gauge how a pedal will actually react to a drum machine or a synth sequence. Ricky approaches gear from a purely electronic and beat-making perspective, which is exactly how we use these tools.
Routing Pedals in the Studio (The Gain Trap)
Bringing that raw, analogue magic into a pristine digital studio comes with a hidden cost. You cannot just plug and play. If you are going to leave the safety of the box and incorporate a pedal like the Meraki into your synth rig or DJ setup, you have to navigate the physical realities of impedance and gain staging.
Guitar pedals are designed to receive a weak, high-impedance instrument signal from a guitar pickup. Synthesisers, drum machines, and DJ mixers output a hot, low-impedance line-level signal. If you plug a Moog directly into an analogue pedal at full volume, you will likely overload the input stage, resulting in harsh, ugly clipping before the audio even hits the delay chips.
You have a few options to fix this, depending on your setup:
- The Modular Interface: In my Eurorack rig, I use an ADDAC200PI Pedal Integrator. This dedicated 4HP module takes the scorching hot audio signal from my modular synth and actively steps it down to a guitar-friendly level before sending it out to the Meraki. It then takes the returning signal from the pedal and amplifies it back up to modular levels. I have this strapped to a BoredBrain Optx v2 ADAT converter, which means I can seamlessly route audio from Ableton, out through the optical ADAT, through the modular, out to the Meraki pedal, and back into the computer.
- Dedicated Re-Amp Boxes: If you aren’t using modular, use something like the Strymon AA.1 or a dedicated re-amping box to actively step the line-level signal down to instrument level, and then step it back up when returning to your audio interface.
- The Mixer Aux Send: This is the classic studio and DJ method. Connect the pedal to an Aux Send on your physical mixer. Turn the master Aux Send volume down to a level the pedal can handle without clipping. When I was DJing heavily, my absolute favourite mixer was the Rane Empath. It had a brilliant, unique feature: dedicated stereo send/returns right on the back panel, with a physical wet/dry mix slider right on the front. This made it incredibly easy to wire up a delay pedal (and often a wah-wah pedal right after it) and instantly ride the effects live over a DJ set.
Whether you are using a dedicated modular interface or a classic DJ mixer, the rule remains the same: manage your gain staging before you hit the pedal.
While I don’t have a desk in the studio (yet) – returning the delay to its own dedicated channel makes the pedal a truly playable instrument. I can EQ the delayed signal to remove low-end mud, physically ride the fader to bring the delay up during a transition, and even route the delay channel into another Aux Send to feed it into a massive reverb. This is at the very core of Dub Style Mixing.
The Verdict
We live in an era where perfection is cheap. You can download a perfect digital delay plugin for nothing.
The Walrus Audio Meraki is not about perfection. It is an expensive, heavy, unapologetic celebration of beautiful flaws. It leans entirely into the murk, the dark saturation, and the physical degradation of audio passing through thousands of tiny electronic buckets.
Long term, there is still a physical Spring Reverb (another piece of gear I used to own) and an actual, spinning reel-to-reel Tape Delay on my studio wishlist. But for the moment, I am incredibly excited to put the mouse down, grab these knobs, and get completely lost in the delay line.