Old Blood Noise Endeavors Setback

The Old Blood Noise Endeavors Setback is a reverse delay pedal: instead of echoing your notes after you play them, it plays the repetitions backwards, so each repeat swells up towards you rather than fading away. Old Blood Noise Endeavors describes it as the company's ideal reverse, "something that can be textural and off on its own timing or totally tempo synced; gritty and characterful or clean and tidy; intuitive and controlled and yet fun and surprising."¹

What makes the Setback more than a straightforward reverse delay is its Speed control, which changes the playback speed of the reverse and creates pitch-shifting effects in the repeats. Gearnews found the result to be "surprising and multi-layered textures in the repetitions. From crystalline echoes to lo-fi grit."² The pedal runs stereo in and out with analog dry through, so your dry signal stays analog while the reversed playback goes through digital processing.¹²

What the Setback does

A reverse delay records what you play and plays it back in reverse, which turns normal picking into backwards-swell textures familiar from tape experiments. The Setback builds that idea out with pitch shifting: the Speed knob changes how fast the reversed audio plays back, so repeats can drop or rise in pitch rather than simply repeating at the original speed.¹

The pedal is built to work two ways. Left to its own timing it produces free-running textural repeats, and with the aux switch and Div control it can be tempo synced, with subdivisions setting where the reverse lands relative to your tempo.¹⁶ Gearnews characterized the range as running from "raw and characterful, or clear and clean."²

The controls

The Setback keeps its panel simple, with a small set of knobs plus secondary functions.¹⁶

The soft-touch on/off footswitch uses relay switching for minimal switch noise, and the pedal has two buttons that let you control tap tempo and sustained feedback.¹² Beyond the panel, the Setback takes an expression pedal that works with every control function, and MIDI control over everything in the pedal, including MIDI clock in for external syncing.¹² Three storable presets are on board.²

Power and connections

The Setback requires a 9V DC center negative power supply with a 2.1mm jack, capable of 350mA, and the supply is not included.⁶

Connections are stereo in and out with analog dry through, and the bypass is selectable between buffered trails, which let repeats ring out after bypass, and true bypass.¹³

History: an extended BL-44

The Setback was released on April 14, 2026, and it replaces a pedal that Old Blood Noise had already built once. Guitar Pedal X described the Setback as "kind of an extended version of the BL-44 with those additional tap divisions, and full Stereo processing," and OBNE discontinued the BL-44 Reverse at the same time, with the Setback presented as its successor.³⁷ The BL-44 is now listed as sold out on the maker's site.⁴

The BL-44 itself has a lineage. Guitar World reported that OBNE took the reverse delay section from its Minim delay pedal as the core of the BL-44 build, and MusicRadar noted the BL-44 evolved out of the Minim reverb/delay ambience unit.⁸ The maker traces the line further back: "a lineage that goes from Rever to Minim to BL-44 and a little bit into Parting," connecting the Setback to the Rêver reverse delay and reverb and the Parting collaboration with harpist Emily Hopkins.⁶

Compared with the BL-44, which carried a single Volume knob and sold for $179.00, the Setback adds the tap divisions, full stereo processing via TRS jacks, presets, MIDI and expression control, at $259.00.³⁴⁵

What reviewers said

Early press coverage was positive but not uncritical. Gearnews concluded:

Gearnews, April 15, 2026²

Guitar Pedal X's Stefan Karlsson was more mixed, writing:

Stefan Karlsson, Guitar Pedal X, April 14, 2026³

On price, the press figures at launch disagreed: Gearnews reported $295 with upcoming availability, while the maker's own site lists the Setback at $259.³⁷²

The pedal comes in four colorways: Begonia, Hydrangea, Petunia and Ikey Likey.¹

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