Eddie Van Halen never stopped using his pair of Roland SDE-3000 digital delays ever since he first installed them in his stage rack in 1985.
His SDE-3000s played a crucial role in his mammoth sound, first in a stereo setup in the ’80s and from the early ’90s onward, as part of a wet/dry/wet rig he innovated, which employed a dry signal in the center and a mix of dry/delay processed signals on the left and right. This gave Van Halen's guitar a huge, reverb-like spread and depth without sacrificing an atom of punch, clarity or definition.
