A rusted-but-rocking
original Deluxe Memory Man.
Photo courtesy of JHS Pedals8. The Edge's Electro-Harmonix Memory Man Deluxe
Knowing when not to play is probably
the instinct that saved the Edge a lot of
headaches in the early days of U2, because
it opened him up to the possibilities of
using manipulated sound to further his
ideas. Lucky for us, he was polishing
his deceptively simple guitar technique
during a time—the late ’70s and early
’80s—when new and exotic effects pedals
were flooding the market. The Electro-Harmonix Memory Man Deluxe was
one of these. It improved on the
Memory Man (originally released in
’76) by adding level and chorus-vibrato
to the existing delay, feedback, and blend
controls, which made for a box that could
churn out alien tone bends and echo
washed delays seemingly without limit.
“I got this echo unit and I brought it
back to rehearsal,” Edge recalls in It Might Get Loud.
“I just got totally into listening
to the return echo, filling in notes that
I’m not playing, like two guitar players
rather than one—the exact same thing,
but just a little bit off to one side. I could
see ways to use it that had never been
used. Suddenly everything changed.” The
changes came fast and furious. You can
hear the Memory Man prominently on “A
Day Without Me,” the lead single from
U2’s Boy, and for the next decade the
Edge honed a richly layered and mutable
sound that guitarists young and old are
still trying to duplicate.
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