Ibanez DM2000

The Ibanez DM2000 is a rack-mount digital delay unit produced by Ibanez in the early 1980s, at a time when digital delay was still a relatively new concept and a considerable step up in fidelity from the analog bucket-brigade delays that preceded it. Where analog delays degraded and darkened with each repeat, the DM2000 produced cleaner, more articulate echoes — while retaining enough character to feel musical rather than clinical.

It occupies a single 19" rack unit and provides multiple delay modes along with feedback control and stereo outputs. The unit was widely used in professional touring rigs through the mid-1980s and into the 1990s, valued for its reliability and the particular quality of its digital repeats — which, by the standards of later 24-bit units, still carry a certain warmth and slight graininess that became part of their sonic identity.

By the time Trey acquired his, the DM2000 was already a piece of used gear with history behind it — part of the deliberate, often vintage-leaning character of the equipment that went into the 1994 Bradshaw rack.

The DM2000 arrived as part of the wholesale transformation of Trey's rig in April 1994. Prior to that, Trey was running a relatively simple setup — the Mesa Boogie Mark III heads, a pedalboard with a handful of floor effects, and no rack system at all. The guitar went more or less directly into the amps with a small chain of stomp boxes in between.

Bob Bradshaw built a two-rack MIDI system for Trey that spring, and the DM2000 was placed in Rack A — the effects rack, which sat to the lower right of the stage setup. The unit was wired into the Bradshaw loop switcher, meaning it could be engaged, bypassed, or reconfigured via MIDI program changes from Trey's CAE RS-10 floor controller without touching any patch cables or knobs mid-show.

This integration was fundamental to how the DM2000 got used. Rather than being something Trey engaged manually and set manually during a performance, it could be pre-programmed into a preset — so a particular delay time and feedback level could be dialled in in advance and recalled with a single footswitch press.

The DM2000 is most significant for enabling what Phish fans came to call the Digital Delay Loop — or simply the DDL. This was a specific improvisational technique where Trey would set the DM2000 to a very long delay time with high feedback, play a short phrase or texture into it, and then allow the repeating, layering echoes to build into an ambient wash while the band locked into a slow, hypnotic groove around it.

The DDL jam became a recurring feature of Phish shows from 1994 through 1995 and into 1996, often emerging organically from the end of a longer improvised passage. Fish would drop back to a minimal beat, Page would add long pad tones, Mike would hold a slow pulse, and Trey's looping guitar phrases would cycle and decay over the top. The effect was profoundly spacious — a kind of collective meditation that could last anywhere from a few minutes to considerably longer.

What the DM2000 brought to this technique — compared to the simpler delays Trey had used previously — was enough delay time and clean-enough headroom to sustain the loop without the repeats collapsing into noise. The unit could hold a phrase long enough that it became a drone rather than a distinct echo, which was precisely what the DDL technique required.

A related technique involved rotating the delay time — physically turning the delay time control while the feedback was running. This caused the pitch of the repeating signal to shift up or down, creating a kind of analogue tape-manipulation effect in the digital domain. Trey used this to generate the warbling, pitch-bent textures heard on some of the more extreme DDL passages.