Mythos Pedals Oracle

The Mythos Pedals Oracle, also sold as the Oracle Analog Echo, is a fully analog delay pedal with tap tempo, released in 2021 as Mythos's first pedal outside its dirt-box lineup¹. Its circuit was designed by John Snyder of Electronic Audio Experiments and built around two reissue MN3205 bucket brigade chips, the classic BBD device that gives analog delays their dark, warm repeats¹. The pedal was announced in March 2021 and carried a list price of $259².

The Oracle pays homage to the dark, warm sound of vintage Japanese echo pedals, but it is a unique circuit rather than a clone of any particular unit¹. Guitar World placed it in the lineage of classic analog bucket brigade delays like the Boss DM-2 and the Electro-Harmonix Memory Man, with Mythos's own spin on the format³.

An all-analog bucket brigade delay

The Oracle was not always an analog design. It was originally conceived as a digital unit, but Mythos reworked it to hark back to classic analog bucket brigade delays instead⁵. The finished pedal boasts an all-analog signal path: Premier Guitar describes it as a fully analog delay created when Zach Broyles of Mythos teamed up with John Snyder of Electronic Audio Experiments⁴. On That Pedal Show, Dan and Mick grouped it with pedals that have an entirely analog signal path, in a 2021 season that saw Suhr, J Rockett and Mythos each launch analog delay pedals⁹.

At the heart of the circuit are two reissue MN3205 bucket brigade chips²⁷⁶. A bucket brigade chip passes your signal down a chain of tiny capacitors one step at a time, and that stepping is what creates the delay. It is the same family of chips used in the vintage Japanese echo pedals the Oracle draws on, and the pair of them gives the pedal its 600ms of delay time⁷.

The enclosure also breaks from Mythos tradition. Where many Mythos pedals carry mythological-themed imagery, the Oracle uses a minimalistic design with simple white-on-red graphic text³.

The controls and tap tempo

The control layout is deliberately simple: three knobs and two footswitches¹.

The three knobs are, as Guitar.com's news piece put it, self-explanatory, covering time, feedback and mix⁵. The tap-tempo footswitch is the modern convenience in an otherwise vintage-voiced pedal: it lets you set the delay time in real time with your foot, and it also lets you push the delay time past the 600ms maximum of the knob². Gearnews noted that going past the 600ms mark produces degraded, broken repeats, a character some players seek out⁸. An external tap-tempo jack socket lets you plug in a remote tap switch⁶.

All the input and output jacks sit on the top of the enclosure, which lets the pedal sit neatly on a pedalboard with jacks out of the way⁸.

What reviewers said

Guitar.com reviewed the Oracle in September 2021, and the review described the pedal's look: where other Mythos units carry mythological-themed imagery, the Oracle takes a more minimalistic approach, with simple white-on-red graphic text³. The pedal was available at the time for $259².

Pedal of the Day reviewed it in February 2022 and called it a simple yet extremely impressive pedal, praising the always-welcome tap-tempo footswitch and observing that the delay voicing is dark but does not get completely muffled⁷. The same review noted one trade-off common to BBD designs: the longer the delay time, the more noise creeps into the echoes⁷.

Delicious Audio added the Oracle to its list of Best Analog Delay Pedals, and in a 2024 update to that guide described it as a simple 3-knob delay inspired by the somewhat dark, warm sound of vintage Japanese echo pedals¹¹⁰.

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