Line 6’s DL4 has been a standard digital delay pedal for several years now, especially in the church scene where I mostly play. I bought mine used 2 years ago and it’s served me really well, giving me access to looping functions as well as being able to save 3 presets of some really great and interesting delay types–it does reverse, tape, digital, swell, & modulated delay, among others.
It’s recently fallen out of favor in the gear community somewhat, due in part to three major drawbacks:
- While it has a tap tempo, there’s no way to set it for dotted eighth delay like you can with my Boss DD-5–you have to tap that in manually.
- It’s big, so it takes up a lot of pedal board real estate.
- It’s known for being one of the most unreliable pedals out there as far as sturdiness–the switches on it are not the highest quality, and the way they are designed, they tend to break down easily.
The third of these is the most weighty. When I bought mine, one of the switches was already finicky (had to press it two or three times to get it going). It wasn’t a big deal, because I had two other preset buttons to work with. However, a month ago, one of the other switches started to go bad, and I decided that it was time to get it repaired.
In looking around for an out of warranty repair, I stumbled upon this thread by a guy in FL who takes faulty DL4’s and tricks them out with all sorts of cool features. His name is Daniel Rasp and I would recommend his work to anyone who has a DL4. I took one look at his list and realized this was the direction I wanted to go.
I was able to repair my DL4 and make it completely one of a kind and unique to my board, with the custom upgrades that I wanted. I had him go to town on my old, broken down delay pedal, and this was the result:
Before:

After:



Daniel powder coated the DL4 in a deep red, and replaced all the LEDs with different colors. For those who are gear nerds like me, here’s the skinny on all the mods he did:
- Repainted the body
- new LEDs
- fixed the very slight volume drop that tends to happen when you engage the pedal (same as the Keeley mod)
- replaced all the switches with heavy duty pieces that are much sturdier.
- Inserted a tap tempo out that is synced to the tap tempo switch (I will be feeding this jack with a custom designed dual tap tempo that will feed both my DL4 and my DD-5)
- Attached a mini expression wheel to the side of the unit
- On the top are two switches–one is a hard expression switch which basically makes it so that I can jump between two settings for every preset bank, effectively going from 3 saved presets to 6. The second switch toggles between using the expression wheel and the expression switch. It has an LED that changes color depending if I’m on the wheel or the switch.
I can’t tell you how excited I am to get this pedal back next week. Total turn around time was three weeks. This process has taken a pedal that was on it’s last legs and breathed new life into it. If you have a DL4, I would highly reccomend Daniel as someone to work with. He’s incredibly responsive and will work with you to do as much or as little as you need for your DL4. You can email him at drasp(at)earthlink.com (replace the (at) with @).
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