Old Blood Noise Endeavors Black Fountain V3 + Tap Tempo

The Black Fountain V3 + Tap Tempo is a delay pedal from Old Blood Noise Endeavors that recreates the sound of vintage oil can echo units in a digital circuit. Oil can delays were short-lived echo devices from the 1950s that used a rotating oil-coated disc instead of tape, and their repeats came out warm and modulated in a way the maker set out to capture with a modern feature set¹.

Gearnews described it plainly as "a digital recreation of an oil can delay," and noted that the original Black Fountain pedal "was a huge success" for the company². Old Blood Noise Endeavors calls it their flagship pedal¹. As of October 2026 the maker's product page lists it as sold out¹.

A digital take on vintage oil can delay

Oil can delay technology appeared in the 1950s and was, as Delicious Audio put it, "short-lived but full of character"⁴. Instead of the tape loop of an echo unit like a Echoplex, these machines pushed the signal through a rotating disc coated in oil, and the repeats carried a wobble and warmth all their own. The Black Fountain is a digital emulation of that behavior rather than a reproduction of the hardware: Delicious Audio calls it "a delay that emulates vintage echo devices based on the short-lived but full of character 'oil can' technology from the '50s"⁴.

The maker says the pedal covers a wide range, "from doubling modulation to simple slapback to a one-second delay with nearly infinite repeats"¹. In practice that means short settings for thickening a dry part, mid settings for slapback, and long settings with the Feedback knob pushed for ambient washes.

The controls: Time, Feedback, Fluid, Mix and three modes

The pedal keeps the control set simple: four knobs, a mode toggle, and two footswitches²¹.

The three modes give three different delay voices². Modern mode, per Delicious Audio, "emulates the classic long delay of oil can units"⁴. The Fluid knob is the character control: it sets how much of the oil can wobble sits on the repeats, which is the part of the sound that separates this from a clean digital delay.

Two features go beyond the knobs. The Tap Tempo footswitch sets the tempo in real time, and holding it down momentarily maxes out feedback, a common trick for swelling into infinite-repeat washes and then pulling back¹. There is also an expression jack for external control of Time, Feedback, or both¹, which lets you sweep delay time or repeat count from an expression pedal.

Guitar World noted the tap tempo and subdivision switches together give "more precise control over delay time and modulation rate"⁵.

History and versions

The Black Fountain was the company's first ever pedal, and Gearnews called the V3 "a sweet update" to it, adding that "these new features and tap tempo functionality" would make it better still². The V3 is the third version of the pedal², and its headline change over the Black Fountain V2 is tap tempo, along with three subdivisions through an extra toggle switch⁴.

At launch there was also a limited colored version available for a short time from the maker's blackbobbin.com site². The pedal's artwork is by Sam Larson¹.

Old Blood Noise Endeavors has since carried the Black Fountain idea forward in other pedals, including the Black Fountain Stereo, alongside other delays in the range such as the Bathing liminal delay and the PARTING glitch delay made with harpist Emily Hopkins.

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