There is a dual secret behind the wall of sound of U2 and their guitar player known as Edge. The first one is clean sound and the second one is analog delay.
For the amp, any clean amp should do the work. I can only recommend Fender Twin Reverb, Vox AC 30, Roland JC120. But other amps should work fine as well. The important thing is that you keep the settings on the amp as clean as possible. Therefor I am not posting any settings because they depend on the amp you are using (and you should know how to get your cleans). The only tip I can give you is to back off the middle a bit to get that bright, crystal sound found on many U2 records.
The second thing is the analog delay. I think that any analog delay with the right setting can produce U2 sound. The one I tried recently is MXR Carbon Copy. It is a very beautiful, simple and warm sounding delay placed in small box so it doesnt take much space on a pedalboard. It has only three knobs:
Regeneration – which is the amount of feedback and determines the number of tmes the tone is repeated
Mix – Determines the volume of the repeated sounds in regard to the basic (dry) sound
Delay – determines the time between the repeted sounds. This pedal goes up to 600 ms which is almost twice as much in comparicson to old vintage delays from the seventies that went only up to 300 or 400 ms.
You also have a modulation knob that modulates the sound of the repeted notes (but no the basic note) and adds some (chorus-like) colour.
The settings for the U2 sounds are:
Regeneration – 1 o clock, Mix – 4 o clock (nearly max), Delay – 11 o clock, Modulation – on
You can tweak the knobs a little to fine tune the effect and still retain the same type of the sound because the knobs are not that sensitive as they are with digital delays.
You can dial the similar sound with a digital delay if you set it around 300 ms and a lot of effect level, but it is going to miss the warmth required for this sound because unlike analog, digital delays dont colour the sound at all. With digital it is what you send, you get back (repeated) while analog modifies the sound a little (its like you have very very small changes of highs and lows between every repeated sound).
Well mr. Bono, I think I HAVE found what Im looking for
Review by
Ricky Sharples, November 4, 2009
It’s a pity you have to fork out so much money for analog delay units because they are definitely the ones with the nicer sound.