Erica Synths Black BBD, Analog Delay With Double Bucket Brigade Fun

April 30, 2021 Synth Anatomy Eurorack, Hardware, News 0

Erica Synths intros Black BBD, an analog two-line Bucket Brigade delay with smooth crossfading, built-in LFO, and flexible clock noise cancellation circuitry.

Musicians like to use delays. No matter with a guitar or Synthesizer, a delay rarely comes alone. Delays are also a must-have effect in modular synthesis, especially in the Eurorack world. These are available in analog or digital. The analog ones are often based on BBD chips which are very characterful and raw.

Erica Synths has now introduced a new BBD delay module that takes the classic concept in a new direction by making it fully controllable with CV and adding a customizable clock noise cancellation circuitry.

Erica Synths Black BBD

Black BBD is a new analog delay module that is powered by two blendable BBD lines. With the BBD knob, you can smoothly create short 1028 stage delays, longer with 4096 stages, or every result in between.

There are three ways of controlling the time factor. First, you can control it manually with the large knob at the top. Via CV with the time CV input for more advanced delays or modulated by the internal LFO. It can be a square or triangle waveshape or something in between, available via the LFO shape switch. From classic, warm textures up to dirty, screaming lo-fi effects, it is capable of a wide range of delay sounds.

The feedback knob, CV controllable, sets the amount of the signal that you’d like to feed back into the input of the delay. Higher settings, the greater the number of echoes. You can also push the module into self-oscillation whereby the module becomes an independent sound generator.

It also hosts an advanced BBD noise cancellation circuit that reduces the unwanted BBD clock noise. Often they take out all the high frequencies of the signal, but not here. However, there is a colour knob aka lowpass filter which can filter the high frequencies out of the signal. This takes the clarity out of the sound and makes it darker and duller.

On the connection side, you have a mono input, a mix output with a dedicated dry/wet mix knob and CV input, and an additional wet output. It is very helpful to route two signals out of the module at the same time.