Bastl Thyme+ is a delay pedal for maniacs$550 / £535 / €495, bastl-instruments.com
In theory, delay is simple. You play something, your delay pedal (or plugin, or rack unit, or DIY tape unit) captures what you played and spits it back out after a predetermined amount of time. And then it repeats for as long as you tell it to. That’s basically it. Sure, there are ways to dress it up but, at its core, that’s all delay is.

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But the wonderful weirdos at Bastl Instruments are never content to leave things as they are. Thyme+ is a delay unit, but one unlike any other we’ve ever encountered. In fact, getting it to behave like a traditional delay can be a challenge. This is a delay for maniacs; for people who demand the most bizarre sounds and who are willing to pay for them.

Bastl uses the metaphor of a tape machine to describe Thyme+, but it is unabashedly digital. You can reduce the fidelity, modulate playback speed slightly, and add a low-pass filter to darken the tone. But it’s never going to sound like tape. It’s always going to sound like a slightly lo-fi digital delay that can be pushed into bit-crushed chaos. Thyme+ has a fair amount of aural character (even if the filter is a little dull), but that’s not the reason to get one — it’s all about the Robots.
The “Robots” Bastl constantly mentions in its marketing materials are basically just LFOs (well, more like cycling envelopes). But there are a lot of them — nine, in fact; one per parameter for almost all the knobs on the front of the device. The only parameters you can’t modulate are the input gain and the rate and amount of the modulation. Everything else is not only fair game, but has its own dedicated Robot. So you can slowly change the fine timing of the delay to get gentle, tape-esque warbles, while harshly and quickly modulating the volume into ringmod territory yields complex effects that would be impossible on most other delay units.
Robot switch on the Thyme+
There are a lot of waveshapes to choose from for the LFOs, from slewed randomness, to stepped triangles and, of course, sine. Beyond that though, the robots can be put into one-shot mode, controlled by an external CV source or, our favourite, triggered by an envelope follower. If you use the envelope follower on the volume in the patch described above, you get something that sounds like a broken radio sputtering to life when you first play a note as the transient is cut off and the volume drops in and out, before gradually settling into drunken echoes that toddle off into infinity.
Now, here’s the really wild part. You can save those settings as presets. There are eight banks of eight, for 64 in total. And you can essentially play those presets like an instrument simply by pressing the keys on Thyme+. The keys can be latching, or momentary for punch-in style effects. You can also hold down the select button while changing parameters on the fly and when you let go, they revert back to the preset. You can even connect a footswitch to the back for controlling the bypass switch. This all makes Thyme+ a treat for live performance.
The other major feature that makes Thyme+ stand out is a 32-step sequencer with four patterns. Sync it up with your DAW or Eurorack skiff via MIDI or CV and you can dole out rhythmically consistent doses of chaos, or create completely new riffs based on the timing of the effects. Without having to resort to complicated automation or MIDI routings in a DAW, we can’t think of another way to accomplish the same task.
Preset bank on the Thyme+
The biggest knock against Thyme+ is that it is difficult to tame and master. The line between subtle modulation and out-of-control weirdness is thin on many of the parameters. And while the idea of sequencing a bunch of delay presets together to create something unique is superb, actually getting musical results is difficult.
Creating a Karplus-Strong preset and punching it in on drums for some Aphex Twin-style outbursts is fun. But using that in a sequence with other presets rarely gives reliable results. With more time we’re sure we could master the quirks of Thyme+ but it demands just that… time.
At $550 Bastl Thyme+ isn’t an impulse purchase, though. If you have your eye on one, you probably know what you’re in for. Lots of weirdness with a steep learning curve. If you’re not turned off by a challenge and don’t mind dropping a decent chunk of change on a pretty niche instrument, you won’t find anything else quite like it.

Key features

3 read heads for multitap delay
Morphable low-pass to high-pass filter
9 “Robot” modulation sources
5 morphable wave options for modulation
Envelope follower and CV control of “robots”
3.5mm MIDI in
Sync via MIDI or analog clock
6.5mm stereo in and out
64 presets
32-step sequencer with 4 patterns
Dimensions: 215 x 115 x 30 mm
Weight: 700 g

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