BionicDelay

I'm another fan of anything useable in dub. Always on the lookout for big uber-delays.

Personally, I'm not that keen on the GUI of this one - some of the knobs are a bit on the small side and very fiddly to set any fine parameters.

Soundwise it's OK as a general delay - not an awful lot of character but useable because of the ability to instil some wow and flutter, and also useful is the ability to tweak the delay timing off the exact tempo. But it becomes really useful when you turn up the feedback to get the repeating filtered dub delays. To be honest, you should probably ignore my earlier whining about general delays, as obviously this one is aimed specifically at being a big resonant dub delay, and at that it does a rather good job.
A reservation I have is that there is a certain point at which the feedback suddenly comes to life, but below which it is difficult to control - it doesn't seem to do an awful lot, but you pass the magic feedback number and hey presto it is immediately an infinite delay - all or nothing. When it's at "all", it's great and characterful, and the filter comes to life, and the delays go on and on and take over your mix wonderfully...sigh....but at "nothing" it is just a boring difficult to fine-tune delay.

So this is my proviso - use Bionic delay solely as a huge dub delay with lots of feedback and filtering and you'll be perfectly happy with it. It definitely has a different character than things like RetroDelay etc. It lends itself to dirty, mulched up dub delays very pleasingly. The type of delay that you bring upfront in the mix and drop out everything else for in-yer-face dub effect.

Another proviso is to have a limiter, or at least compressor after it. It will grow too big quite easily and will clip if you let it. Automation is also a good idea to bring down the feedback afterwards.

It's definitely not my first go-to delay for dub, but I wouldn't like to get rid of it. I wouldn't use it at all for bread and butter delay, but personally I don't see that bread and butter delay is the point of Bionic Delay anyway. Just every now and then, you want to go silly with a delay, and this is the perfect freebie delay to go silly with. It doesn't do much of anything that many other newer delays can't do, and it's not the best-looking on the block either, but it has its own little niche place for grunged up infinite dub, and you'd be daft not to at least give it a try if you do anything in the realms of dub or ambient. Bigger knobs and some colour other than orange would help it, but they're only minor gripes really.

It has a "grooveL" and "grooveR" function which are useful little tools to get the delays off the exact beat and tempo. Not enough delays have this type of feature - exact tempo matching with delays can sound pretty dull, and even muddy up your mix badly, so this is a welcome feature.
Another little gripe with the tempo sync is the lack of options - you've only got the basics such as 1/2, 1/4 etc - I'd like a few more options of dotted and triplet delays. But as I said before - if you use Bionic Delay for what it's good at (huge dub delays), then you're probably going to use either 1/2 or 1/4 note delays anyway.

Not alot more I can say about it really. For me, it's a one-trick pony. Ain't anything wrong with that...it's a good trick.Read Review