Earthquaker Devices Silos review: a surprisingly simple three-mode delay
Going by its last three pedals, Earthquaker is alternating its releases between the whacky and the less-than whacky. The Ledges, a trio of surprisingly conventional reverb sounds, was followed by the Time Shadows V2, about as conventional as a marzipan submarine. But we’re back to normality with the Silos, which is essentially the delay equivalent of the Ledges. It bundles up a digital, analogue and tape delay into one pedal, and boasts the same preset save/recall and user-assignable expression system EQD first introduced with the Aurelius.
READ MORE: EarthQuaker Devices Ledges Tri-Dimensional Reverberation Machine review: a refined three-mode reverb with huge range
Delay is clearly near and dear to EQD founder Jamie Stillman’s heart. The KMD Delay – a vintage BBD oddity that the analogue mode of the Silos is based on – was his first forever pedal, and since then EQD has proffered a strong roster of complex, weird delay units like the Avalanche Run and the Disaster Transport Sr. But the Silos is very much a back-to-basics device – it’s fully mono and unmodulated, and has a basic single-headed signal path. The approach is more in line with a utilitarian offering from Boss than it is an oddball factory like Earthquaker – can a brand known for ‘weird’ delays pull off a normal one?
Does the EarthQuaker Silos sound good?
The three delay modes here are digital, analogue and tape – the digital mode isn’t based on anything in particular, while the analogue and tape modes are based on Jamie Stillman’s own units – that KMD Delay and a vintage Echoplex respectively. All of the modes offer a full second of delay time, and share the same controls for mix, repeats and delay time.
Let’s start with the digital mode. The repeats are relatively bright, but still a little filtered, sitting just under my signal but staying decidedly intact as they do so. With the mix control up high, more complex passages are still recognisable when they come back around. The overall tonality is very fun to play in time with – a little filtering goes a long way in stopping transients building on transients becoming a mess.
The Silos
The most fun thing I found about this mode was the fact that it doesn’t self-oscillate – but at max repeats, things take absolutely ages to decay. With high repeats and the delay time set to its maximum, I could do some cool little micro-looping things with it, bouncing notes off other notes to build a long-lasting but ultimately controlled soundscape.
The analogue mode is a good bit darker, and to my ears is fairly accurate in capturing how a bucket brigade chip pulls your sound apart like so much pork. It’s less distortion, more the analogue equivalent of bit-crushing – each time your signal is shunted to a new bucket in the chain, information is lost – lows and highs are rolled off, and the general moment-to-moment fidelity degrades. It’s a lovely sound in that it’s very easy to forget that it’s on – with everything at noon, it does a sort of ‘sweetening’ effect that just adds a bit of space and depth to things, much like a subtle room reverb might.
There are still some concessions to the digital realm here – the audio destruction isn’t dependent on delay time, being instead applied every repeat. In my experience if a ‘real’ analogue delay can go to a full second, even the first repeat is almost completely destroyed. But hey, this isn’t claiming to be an exact KMD analogue delay clone. It’s just giving you a version of the analogue delay sound – a goal in which it does still succeed. Plus, the fact that repeats aren’t quite smeared into oblivion at longer delay times does open this mode up to a few more use-cases than just murky pseudo-reverb.
Onto the tape mode. It doesn’t offer any control over “the tape things” that you’d get on a more in-depth digital version of an Echoplex, such as the UAFX Orion. There’s no wow/flutter control, nor is there any adjustment to how worn the tape is. Things come pre-set to an unmodulated, reasonably saturated and murky Echoplex sound – definitely not trying to be a brand new loop of tape, but also not trying to be completely destroyed, either.
A louder input means more overt saturation on the repeats, so not only is it very responsive to your picking hand when playing clean, this mode really likes to be set after drive or in your effects loop. I have a lot of fun with it before and after a fuzz pedal, as in both cases its ultra-dark voicing led it to get right out of the way of my actual playing, while still adding a nice bit of swirly ambience.
Some issues
My overall impression of the Silos is ultimately positive, but not entirely frustration-free. Modulation – especially in the tape department – is definitely going on my wishlist for a prospective Silos V2. The pedal’s three voicings were all very good at sitting under my signal – some modulation when that’s the case is a great way to give everything a chorusy lift.
It’s also worth noting that two-footswitch layouts on pedals of this size are understandably divisive. Tap-tempo is a welcome feature, but on a compact pedal its addition is a play-off between a multi-function bypass footswitch (occasionally dangerous in a live situation) or an external tap jack (an extra expense of both cash and pedalboard real estate) or, as with the Silos, the slightly cramped dual footswitch option. I personally don’t mind the two-footswitch thing, but it does mean being careful with pedal placement – you won’t be able to stuff this right up against another pedal if you want to make full use of that tap-tempo.
The Silos
Who is the Silos for?
My quibbles with the Silos are ultimately minor – I still do think this is a great pedal, in a very similar way to the Ledges. Because its mono, single-headed approach is refreshing, and makes it the kind of delay that you don’t need to really think about. It’s not a character delay that’ll do instant shoegaze chaos as soon as it’s engaged, nor is it a delay workstation that asks to be placed at the very end of a complex stereo chain.
I wrote recently about the pedal market all being a bit much – and in the world of delays and reverbs, that manifests as a features arms race. More stereo, more screens, more down-to-the-millisecond control. But for the vast majority of guitarists, the human beings running a mono pedalboard into a bog-standard combo for a gig in a pub, the Silos offers an affordable, utilitarian and sensible delay option with excellent sounds. And while it’s nowhere near as complex as the average boutique delay workstation, the preset recall and assignable expression control offers some live consistency and some interesting performance options.
So I do think $150 for such a box is pretty reasonable. Because like the Ledges, the Silos has an edge when it comes to its fidelity. If you’re going to have a digital version of analogue oddity, it needs to be free of any tell-tale artefacts that indicate 1s and 0s are actually behind it all – here that’s definitely the case. It looks good, it sounds good, it has top-mounted jacks, it won’t break the bank, and it does what it says on the tin. No, it’s not as brain-tickling as an ultra-complex parallel pitch-shifted stereo box, but not everything has to be. It’s pleasing to see a brand like EQD give a bigger player like Boss a run for its money when it comes to making utilitarian single stomps – long may that continue.
The Silos
Earthquaker Silos alternatives
For another take on the bog-standard multi-mode digital delay, you could also seek out the Boss DD-7, which has its own sound but does hit many of the same notes as the Silos, with the added benefit of stereo if you need it. If you’re just looking for the tape delay emulation, the UAFX Orion sounds brilliant and offers a good amount of control, but has a hefty pricetag for a single-mode stomp with no tap-tempo. For a cheaper alternative, the EHX Pico Rerun provides a similar digital emulation of tape delay, with the addition of modulation and tap-tempo.
For the analogue delay thing, there’s always the Boss DM-2W, particularly appropriate here as the KMD delay the Silo’s analogue mode is based on is often compared to the original DM-2 – but keep in mind you’re paying a similar price for a single delay mode, complete with the limitations of an actual BBD chip.
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