Old Blood Noise Endeavors Setback Reverse

The Setback Reverse is a reverse delay pedal from Old Blood Noise Endeavors. Where a normal delay echoes what you played after you played it, a reverse delay reads your signal backwards, so notes swell up instead of fading out. Setback gives you a Mix control to set the blend of wet and dry signals¹, and its enclosure measures 3.25" wide by 5" high by 2" deep¹. The artwork on the pedal is by John Salame¹.

The maker sums up the design goal in its own words:

What a reverse delay does

A reverse delay constantly records what you play and plays it back backwards. Old Blood Noise's earlier BL-44 Reverse, the pedal the Setback replaces, was described by the maker as "a real-time reverse delay, constantly reading backwards what you put" into it⁴. The effect is the familiar backwards-tape sound: attacks become decays, decays become swells, and chords bloom out of silence instead of striking into it.

The BL-44's reverse engine was itself borrowed from an earlier pedal. Guitar World reported in 2022 that "OBNE has taken the reverse delay section from its Minim delay pedal as the core of the build"⁵. The Setback carries that lineage forward in a bigger enclosure with stereo output, presets and full MIDI and expression control.

The controls

The Setback's knob set covers the blend, the timing and the character of the reverse. Two of the knobs do double duty through the Alt controls, which open up volume and direct time manipulation¹.

The Speed and Clock knobs are where the pedal gets unusual. Speed changes how fast the reversed audio plays back, which shifts its pitch the way a tape machine does when you vary its speed. Clock changes the sample rate, which alters the delay time and the fidelity of the signal at once, so pushing it can take the reverse from clean to gritty¹.

Beyond the knobs:

• Presets: onboard storage for your settings¹
• Aux switch: tap tempo and held feedback, or preset switching¹
• Expression control over every knob¹
• MIDI control over everything in the pedal, including MIDI clock in for external syncing¹

The soft-touch on/off footswitch uses relay switching for minimal switch noise, and the bypass can be set for buffered trails, so the reverse tail rings out after you switch off, or true bypass¹.

History: from Rever to Setback

Old Blood Noise has been making reverse pedals for most of its existence. The maker describes it as "a lineage that goes from Rever to Minim to BL-44 and a little bit into Parting," calling the earlier designs "textural reverse pedals"¹. The line runs through the Rêver Reverse Delay and Reverb, the Minim Reverb Delay and Reverse, and the BL-44 Reverse, with a thread of the idea also reaching into the PARTING glitch delay and reverb collaboration with harpist Emily Hopkins.

The BL-44 Reverse from Old Blood Noise Endeavors was an earlier take on the reverse delay idea, and Delicious Audio called it "a unique playable effect"⁶⁷. The BL-44 now shows as sold out on the maker's site⁶¹, and Old Blood Noise has published a Setback instruction manual alongside the BL-44's own manual²⁵.

The Setback is available in four colorways: Begonia, Hydrangea, Petunia and Ikey Likey, with artwork by John Salame¹.

Videos

Click to load

Click to load

Click to load