Every delay pedal ever built has a time knob. It is the one control the format has never questioned — the thing your hand reaches for before your brain has caught up, the knob you nudge a hair flatter when the room is boomy and the eighth notes are smearing. Walrus Audio looked at that knob in 2017 and deleted it.
That is the single most important fact about the ARP-87, and nine years later it is still the thing that decides whether you love this pedal or sell it inside a month. There is no time knob. There is a tap tempo switch, a ratio knob for subdivisions, and that is the whole of your rhythmic control. Premier Guitar’s Charles Saufley, reviewing it in the December 2017 issue, described the target customer as “a unique breed of delay user known as the tap-tempo control freak” — and then admitted in the same review that he personally prefers dialling repeat rates in by ear. That tension is the pedal in a sentence.
What survives the argument is that the ARP-87 sounds superb, costs less than most of its competition, hides a fifth algorithm behind a Konami code, and has quietly ended up on more working pedalboards than its modest profile suggests — including boards belonging to a skateboarding legend, a Mutemath keyboard-guitarist, and one of Instagram’s most-watched guitar players. This is the full GuitarGangsters guide to a delay that is far stranger, and far better documented, than its unassuming grey enclosure lets on.
The Origin Story: A Pedal That Went Back To The Drawing Board
Walrus Audio has been building pedals in Oklahoma City since 2011, and by the middle of the last decade the company had a delay problem. Its flagship echo, the Bellwether, was a large-format analog-voiced delay with a devoted following and a footprint nobody wanted on a modern crowded board. What Walrus needed was a compact delay with the same tonal ambition. What it announced at Winter NAMM in January 2017 was not, by its own admission, that pedal.
The company’s own press release is unusually candid about this. “One of the most anticipated and talked about announcements from Walrus Audio since Winter NAMM has been the ARP-87 Multi-Function Delay,” it reads. “Since the announcement, the delay has gone back to the drawing board and almost completely redone to become even more versatile.” That is a manufacturer telling the trade press, in writing, that the pedal it showed at the biggest gear trade show of the year was not good enough and had been rebuilt. It is a rare thing to see in a press release and it is worth taking seriously as evidence that the shipping ARP-87 is a considered design rather than a rushed one.
The redone version was unveiled at Summer NAMM and formally introduced on 12 July 2017, with a retail price of $199 and a stated ship date of 18 July 2017. It reached players fast: Pedal of the Day had a full write-up live by 11 August 2017, barely three weeks after the ship date.
A Date Trap Worth Flagging
If you go looking for the ARP-87’s launch date online you will find 2016 quoted repeatedly, and it is wrong. Premier Guitar’s hosted copy of the launch press release carries the dateline “Oklahoma City, OK (July 12, 2016)” in its body text — but the article itself was published 12 July 2017, is tagged for Summer NAMM 2017, and states a July 2017 release date in its own final paragraph. The “2016” is a typo in the original press release that has been faithfully reproduced and then scraped by aggregators ever since. The ARP-87 is a 2017 pedal. Anyone selling you a “2016 ARP-87” is either confused or reading the same bad dateline.
What Is Actually Inside The Box
Saufley opened his review unit up, and what he found is the most useful circuit detail available anywhere on this pedal: the delay engine is a Spin Semiconductor FV-1, given what he called “pride of place” on an orderly circuit board. MusicRadar’s Total Guitar reviewers noted the same thing, describing the FV-1 as “a mainstay of boutique builders.”
This matters more than it sounds. The FV-1 is a small, inexpensive, enormously capable reverb-and-delay DSP chip that has powered a startling proportion of the boutique ambient pedals of the last fifteen years. Knowing it is in there tells you three things immediately. First, the ARP-87’s “analog” mode is a digital emulation, not a bucket-brigade circuit — Walrus never claimed otherwise, but plenty of retail copy has muddied it. Second, the 1000ms maximum delay time is a hard architectural ceiling, not a design choice you can argue with. Third, the pedal’s price is achievable precisely because the heavy lifting is done by a chip rather than by rows of hand-matched analog components.
The rest of the build is straightforwardly good. Saufley called construction solid, noted the soft relay switches were responsive, and singled out the graphics for praise: “commendation is due for the excellent sci-fi-paperback-style spacecraft graphic and the matte-sparkle grey finish.” That artwork is by illustrator Chris Castro and depicts, per Walrus, “a lone ship traveling through the ARP-87 Galaxies” — a lone ship lost in the Arp Galaxy, in the original press wording. The finish is officially Frosted Charcoal with cream and seafoam ink.
Full Specifications
One Spec Number To Ignore
Guitar.com’s review lists the ARP-87’s dimensions as 64mm x 52mm x 120mm, which does not match Walrus’s 4.77″ x 2.6″ x 1.39″ (roughly 121 x 66 x 35 mm). This is not an error specific to this pedal — the same publication printed a near-identical figure in its reviews of the Walrus Julia and Julianna. It is a house measuring convention, probably a bare-enclosure or differently-ordered measurement, and it is not worth trying to reconcile. Trust the manufacturer’s figure when you are planning board space.
The Four Algorithms, Honestly Assessed
Digital
Walrus describes it as “pristine, crystal clear repeats great for rhythmic riffs.” Saufley’s more useful observation is that it is not a brittle digital delay even at the brightest settings — and that getting the liveliest results out of it usually meant pushing Dampen above noon, “even with toppy Danelectro, Telecaster, and Jazzmaster pickups driving the works.” In other words, this is a warm-leaning digital voice, and if you are coming from a Boss DD-3 expecting glassy clinical repeats you will need to brighten it rather than darken it. Owners routinely use Dampen the other way, to blur Digital until it sits somewhere between Digital and Analog — one Walrus customer called that “the thing I love most about the ARP-87.”
Analog
This is the algorithm that draws the most criticism, and the criticism is fair. It softens repeats pleasantly and sits beautifully in a mix, but it does not do the specific thing bucket-brigade fans want. Saufley, an avowed BBD partisan, was direct: he “usually found myself wishing for a little more color and the husky, cracked repeat overtones that I love so much in Memory Man, DM-2, and Carbon Copy delays.” If those three are your reference points, the honest advice is to buy one of them — the EHX Deluxe Memory Man, the Boss DM-2W or the MXR Carbon Copy — rather than expecting the ARP-87 to impersonate them.
Saufley’s own resolution of this is the most quotable line in the review and the fairest summary of the mode: “it’s easy to see how the ARP-87’s analog voice could be the perfect ‘analog’ delay for digital delay fans.” That is exactly right. If you have never owned a BBD delay, this mode is lovely. If you have, it will feel polite.
A recurring owner complaint follows from this: several players report that Digital and Analog are not different enough to justify being separate modes. One long-form reviewer put it bluntly — “there’s not really enough difference between the Digital and Analog modes to warrant them being separate modes.” Take that seriously when you audition it.
Lo-Fi
This is the reason to buy the pedal. Both Saufley and Guitar.com’s Michael Watts landed on it as the standout, and it is the mode owners name over and over. Walrus describes the range as “warm, warped, and murky, to straight AM radio,” and the X knob’s behaviour here is different from the other three modes: instead of modulation depth, it sets filter width, narrowing the repeats to something Saufley likened to “an old television set” or opening them out into a broad, frequency-rich wash.
The practical consequence he identified is the most useful piece of signal-chain advice on this pedal: the filter lets you pair the Lo-Fi voice with big reverbs without the combination turning into undifferentiated mud. Run it into a Strymon BigSky or a Keeley Caverns and narrow the filter until the delay stops fighting the reverb tail. That is a genuinely non-obvious trick.
Slap
Walrus pitched this at “smoking chicken pickin’ runs,” and it does that competently. But the interesting reports are the ones that ignore the pitch. Watts found it “very good indeed (especially for vocals)” and noted it “can get substantially weird” with the X knob wound up. Saufley pushed it further: triplet ratios, heavy modulation and aggressive Level and Repeats produce “clangy, metallic Doctor Who-style echoes that sound wicked for simple melodies and slide solos.”
Not everyone is convinced. One detailed owner review calls Slap “pointless” and argues Walrus should have added 16th-note subdivisions and moved the secret fifth algorithm onto that program position instead. If you want a classic rockabilly slapback in the Brian Setzer tradition, a dedicated slapback pedal or a tape echo will get you there with less fuss — but as a springboard for something stranger, Slap earns its place.
The Hidden Fifth Algorithm
The ARP-87 has an easter egg, and it is real, documented and reproducible. Guitar.com described it as a “stompbox ‘Konami code'”: turn the Program knob to full left lock, hold the tap tempo switch down, then turn the Program knob fully to the right. What you get is a tremolo-delay hybrid running inside Slap mode — a delay whose repeats pulse.
Two things to know before you go looking for it. First, it is genuinely undocumented in the manual, which is a legitimate complaint owners raise; one Walrus customer wrote that “the manual of the pedal does not describe everything that the pedal does and can potentially do.” Second, several owners report that the hidden mode “can initially confuse new users, as it may seem like the pedal is malfunctioning if not set correctly.” If your delay suddenly starts throbbing and you did not mean it to, you have found the easter egg by accident. Cycle the Program knob back through the normal positions.
Owners describe the sound as “an interesting delay-tremolo kind of thing that swells in the attack” and, more enthusiastically, as “insanely trippy.” It is not a headline feature and it will not sell the pedal on its own, but it is a real extra voice and a fair few people bought the ARP-87 specifically because of it. For a more conventional take on pulsing modulation you would want a dedicated unit like the MXR M305 Tremolo, but as a bonus mode it is a good one.
Famous Players: What The Evidence Actually Supports
Here is where this article has to do some correcting, because the standard list of ARP-87 users circulating in gear databases and content farms is wrong in a specific and predictable way.
The list you will see attached to this pedal reads: The Edge, David Gilmour, John Frusciante, Andy Summers, Steve Vai. Every one of those five is a legendary delay user. Not one of them has ever been documented using an ARP-87. That roster is the generic “famous delay players” list, pasted onto a delay SKU by an automated process that never checked. The Edge built his sound on rack units and a Line 6 DL4. Gilmour’s echoes came from Binson Echorecs and later Pete Cornish-built systems. Frusciante is a Boss DD man. Summers’s signature ambience is chorus and analog echo from the late 1970s and early 1980s. Vai runs full rack systems and Fractal hardware. None of them needs a $199 compact delay and none of them has been photographed with one.
The genuine roster is smaller, younger and considerably more interesting.
Tier 1: Documented On Camera, In Their Own Rig
Mateus Asato is the strongest name and the clearest evidence. In his own filmed pedalboard walkthrough, at the 12:04 mark, he takes viewers through his signal chain and the ARP-87 is visible and named alongside a Walrus Julia chorus and a Walrus Slö reverb. That is a three-Walrus board from a player with an enormous following, filmed by the artist himself, with the pedal identified in the chain rather than just sitting in a photograph. It is worth noting in passing that at least one major gear database files Asato under the band “Silk Sonic,” which he has never been a member of — he is a solo instrumentalist and session player. Read the evidence caption, never the band label.
Tommy Guerrero is the most charming entry on the list. Guerrero was a professional skateboarder — a Bones Brigade member, one of the defining street skaters of the 1980s — before becoming a prolific instrumental musician of dusty, groove-led guitar records. In the filmed “Sunset Live Session at Uluwatu Surf Villas” in Bali, his pedalboard is visible at roughly 12:28 with the ARP-87 as the last pedal in the chain, and he is seen tapping tempo on it repeatedly through the session. That is exactly the kind of evidence that counts: the pedal in use, in performance, being operated by the artist on camera.
Tier 2: Photographed On Their Board
Todd Gummerman of Mutemath — who has also toured with Twenty One Pilots — has the ARP-87 documented in a pedalboard photograph. Mutemath’s whole aesthetic is built on rhythmic, tap-locked delay against live drums, which makes this the single most stylistically appropriate placement on the list; a delay with no time knob and a great tap switch is exactly right for that band.
Ariel Posen, the Winnipeg slide player whose baritone-adjacent tone has made him a fixture of modern guitar YouTube, has an ARP-87 visible in a pedalboard photograph posted to his own social media.
Denver Dalley (Desaparecidos, Statistics) has a board shot showing the ARP-87 alongside a Walrus Phoenix power supply, a Walrus Fathom reverb and a Walrus Messner — another all-in Walrus rig.
Jonny Ashburn of Caspian, one of the most respected post-rock bands of the last two decades, has the ARP-87 visible mid-board in a filmed rig walkthrough. For a band whose entire vocabulary is layered, decaying repeats, that is a meaningful placement.
Dan O’Connor of Four Year Strong runs the ARP-87 with a Warhorn, a Julia, a Voyager and a Descent — five Walrus pedals on one board. Grayson Stewart of Norma Jean has it documented on his board, which is a useful corrective to the assumption that this is purely an ambient-indie pedal; Norma Jean are a metalcore band. The Backseat Lovers have shown it in a band social post. Peter “Danish Pete” Honoré, the session player and Andertons regular, has posted it as part of his live setup.
Tier 3: Demo And Promotional Only — Excluded
Rabea Massaad and Tyler Larson both appear on standard user lists for this pedal, and both connections trace back to demo videos. Massaad’s appearance is in Walrus Audio’s own official ARP-87 demo film, where he describes it warmly. That is a paid or supplied-gear demo, not evidence of a touring board, and this guide does not count it. The same applies to Larson, whose appearance is a YouTube demo timestamp. Both are excellent players and both may well own one — but a demo is not a rig.
The Honest Summary
Twelve documented users, of whom two have proper on-camera in-rig evidence and eight have credible photographs. That is a respectable roster for a mid-priced compact delay from a boutique builder, and it skews exactly where you would expect: post-rock, indie, session players, and a couple of heavier outliers. What it emphatically does not include is a single arena-headlining delay legend. Anyone telling you otherwise is reading a generated list.
Tone Recipes And Settings
Ambient Wash (Lo-Fi)
Program to Lo-Fi. Level around 2 o’clock, Repeats around 2 o’clock, Dampen at 10 o’clock to pull the highs out, Ratio on a dotted or triplet division, X around 11 o’clock to keep the filter narrow. The narrow filter is the key: it stops the repeats competing with whatever reverb is downstream. This is the setting Caspian-adjacent players live in, and it pairs beautifully with a Dispatch Master or a big hall reverb behind it.
Rhythmic Eighth-Note Lead (Digital)
Program to Digital. Level at noon, Repeats at 10 to 11 o’clock — three or four audible repeats, no more — Dampen at 1 to 2 o’clock to keep the repeats present, Ratio on eighth notes, X off or barely on. Owners note that the eighth-note ratio setting lands the delay time somewhere around 340–380 ms at typical rock tempos, which is squarely in classic lead-delay territory. This is the closest the ARP-87 gets to a straightforward Boss DD-200 style lead sound.
Faux Bucket Brigade (Analog)
Program to Analog. Level at 11 o’clock, Repeats at noon, Dampen at 11 o’clock, Ratio on quarter notes, X at 9 to 10 o’clock for a whisper of modulation. Saufley specifically flagged that the Analog voice “sounds great with small doses of modulation from the X knob” — resist the urge to wind X up here. This is the setting for adding depth behind chords without anyone noticing there is a delay on.
Doctor Who Slide Melody (Slap)
Straight from Saufley: Program to Slap, Ratio on a triplet division, X wound high, Level and Repeats both aggressive. The result is “clangy, metallic” and it works for single-note melodies and slide lines rather than chords. It is not subtle and it is not supposed to be.
AM Radio Texture (Lo-Fi, Extreme)
Program to Lo-Fi. Dampen almost fully counterclockwise, X near maximum for a wide, warped filter, Repeats high, Level high. This is where the pedal earns its “straight AM radio” description. Excellent for a bridge section, exhausting for a whole set.
The Momentary Tricks
Two hold functions do more for your playing than any knob position. With the effect on, holding the Bypass switch ramps the X parameter to maximum and releases it back to the knob position — instant modulation swell. Holding the Tap switch ramps feedback to maximum and releases — instant runaway self-oscillation as a performance gesture rather than a setting. And with the effect off, holding Bypass momentarily engages the delay for a single burst of texture, which is the fastest way to throw one echo onto one word or one note without committing to a delay for the section. Owners consistently name these two functions as the pedal’s best-kept feature.
The ARP-87’s six knobs are Level, Repeats, Dampen, Ratio, X and Program. Level is the wet mix, Repeats is feedback, Dampen is a tone control on the repeats, Ratio selects the subdivision the tap tempo is divided into, X is the mode-dependent wildcard, and Program picks the algorithm. Everything below assumes tap tempo set to the song, and every setting is a starting point rather than gospel.
How It Compares
Against The Obvious Rivals
Saufley named the pedal’s closest competition at launch as the TC Electronic Flashback and the JHS Pink Panther. The Flashback comparison remains the sharpest one: TC’s pedal has a time knob, has TonePrint, and costs less. What it does not have is the ARP-87’s Lo-Fi voice or its momentary hold functions. If you want the most delay per dollar, buy the TC. If you want a specific character and a pair of expressive footswitch gestures, buy the Walrus.
MusicRadar’s reservation is worth repeating because it is the strongest argument against the pedal: “at this price it may be worth saving for a delay monster like the Eventide Space, Boss DD-500 or Strymon TimeLine.” That is true and it is not a small point — for roughly another hundred dollars used you are into flagship territory with presets, MIDI, stereo and unlimited routing. The ARP-87’s counter-argument is that it does one thing you do not need a menu to reach, and it does it in a footprint the size of a Boss pedal.
Guitar.com’s suggested alternatives were the Boss DD-200, the DOD Rubberneck and the Source Audio Nemesis. Of those, the Nemesis is the one that genuinely overlaps — more algorithms, more depth, considerably more menu.
Against Its Own Family
The ARP-87 has spent most of its life sold alongside the Fathom reverb, and Walrus has repeatedly boxed the two together. The most notable of these is the SLARP, a single enclosure combining the Slö reverb and the ARP-87 with one power supply and top-mounted jacks. Owners are fairly clear-eyed about it: the SLARP is convenient and saves board space, but buying a used Slö and a used ARP-87 separately is usually cheaper, and the SLARP lacks an order toggle to swap which effect comes first. There is also a Fathom/ARP-87 combined unit that appeared in various dealer-exclusive versions around 2019.
Within the wider Walrus line, the ARP-87 is the entry point to the brand’s delay thinking. Above it sit the Mako-series D1 High-Fidelity Delay and the Monarch-series Meraki stereo analog dual delay. The ARP-87’s siblings on most Walrus boards are the Julia and Julianna choruses — see our guides to the Julia V2 and the Julianna Deluxe Chorus/Vibrato — and the ACS1 amp and cab simulator for players going direct.
Against The Rest Of The Delay World
If tap tempo is your priority, the ARP-87 competes with the Boss DD-8 and the EarthQuaker Devices Avalanche Run, both of which give you a time knob and tap. If you want lo-fi character specifically, the EHX Canyon and the JHS 3 Series Delay are cheaper routes to grit. If you want warmth and are willing to give up subdivisions, the Maxon AD999 and the Carbon Copy remain the reference analog boxes. And if what you actually want is tape, the Boss RE-2 and RE-202 Space Echo reissues do something the ARP-87 does not attempt.
Owner comparisons are candid on two points worth repeating. Several report the ARP-87 is “less punchy compared to other delays,” which tracks with its mix-friendly voicing — it is designed to sit under a band, not to leap out of one. And several note that for straightforward, conventional delay sounds a Keeley Halo is preferred, while the ARP-87 wins on ambience and lo-fi. That is a fair division of labour.
Buying Guide: Editions, Prices And What To Watch For
Is It Still In Production?
Yes. As of September 2026 the ARP-87 remains in the Walrus Audio Core Series, listed under Delay and Reverb on the manufacturer’s own site, and is not in the discontinued collection. It is stocked at Sweetwater, Guitar Center, Musician’s Friend, Amazon, Reverb, zZounds, Thomann and Gear4Music. For a pedal that launched in 2017, nine unbroken years in a boutique builder’s core line is a meaningful endorsement in itself.
What It Costs In September 2026
List price is $219.99. Street price is $186.99 at Sweetwater, Guitar Center and Musician’s Friend, and price trackers flag that $186.99 as an all-time low — a $33 discount that has been holding steady. Reverb shows the same $186.99 with over fifty units in stock new. Thomann lists it at $189, Gear4Music at £183.50. Used prices start around $135 in excellent condition, with a market average landing around $181.
That used-to-new spread is worth reading carefully. A nine-year-old pedal holding roughly 72 percent of its current street price on the used market is a healthy retention figure, but it is noticeably softer than the Julia and Julianna manage. The reason is simple and it is the time knob: a meaningful percentage of ARP-87 owners discover the tap-only workflow does not suit them and resell within a year. That is bad news for resale value and excellent news for used buyers.
The Limited Editions
Walrus has run the ARP-87 through the same limited-edition treadmill as the rest of its line. The best known is the Stranded edition — a hand-numbered black run limited to 487 pedals, released around 2018–2019 and now the collector’s choice. There have also been Platinum, Obsidian, Craftsman Series, Black Friday (including a 2020 run), Retro and a purple/silver limited version, plus an Onyx collaboration edition tied to a Northwest Arkansas coffee roaster, which owners were notably fond of. Every one of them is the same circuit. Buy the finish you like and do not pay a premium expecting a sonic difference.
The B-Stock Route
Walrus Audio maintains a permanent B-Stock collection of blemished units on its own site, and the ARP-87 appears there regularly in standard, Platinum and Obsidian trim. These are cosmetically imperfect, fully warranted pedals at a real discount, and Walrus’s aftercare on them is unusually good — customers have reported the company emailing and then telephoning after delivery to check they were happy with a discounted blemished unit. If you do not care about a paint flaw, this is the single best value route into the pedal.
Ownership Notes
The Tap Switch Problem
This is the most consistent complaint and you should know about it before you buy. Multiple owners report the tap tempo switch being unreliable — one wrote that “it seems you need five or six taps before it registers, and even then, sometimes I find it dials in a quarter note no matter which Subdivision I’ve got it set to.” Others report the tap switch “occasionally failing to register inputs accurately during performance.” It is not universal and it may vary by production run, but on a pedal where tap tempo is the only way to set delay time, an unreliable tap switch is not a minor inconvenience. Test it thoroughly, and consider running an external tap switch into the third jack, which several owners find more reliable and which also solves the second problem below.
Footswitch Spacing
Saufley flagged it and owners echo it: the bypass and tap switches are close together, and “this becomes doubly critical in the absence of a repeat rate knob.” If your feet are not precise you will occasionally bypass the pedal when you meant to tap. An external tap switch placed somewhere comfortable is the standard fix.
Tempo Does Not Survive A Program Change
Changing algorithm loads an entirely new program, and the tempo must be tapped in again. Walrus states this plainly in the manual and every reviewer has flagged it. If you plan to switch algorithms mid-song, you cannot — not without re-establishing the tempo. Plan around it: pick one algorithm per song.
Bypass, Trails And Power
The ARP-87 uses buffered relay switching, not true bypass. You will see “true bypass” claimed on aggregator pages; it is wrong, and the manufacturer’s own spec sheet says Buffered. Trails and no-trails modes are user-selectable by holding the bypass switch for one second while applying power — unplug and repeat to toggle back. There is no battery compartment; the pedal needs 9V DC centre-negative at 100 mA minimum, and Walrus specifically recommends an isolated supply and advises against daisy chains. Budget a slot on a decent power brick and keep a PolyTune 3 Mini or Boss TU-3 in front of it as usual.
Repeats Are Not Infinite
Holding the tap switch ramps feedback to maximum, but owners are clear that even at maximum the repeats decay rather than self-oscillating forever. If your ambient practice depends on genuinely infinite freeze-style repeats you will want something else in the chain. One owner also noted an occasional pop when releasing the held tap switch during “spacey mad jams.”
Placement In The Chain
Standard delay placement applies: after drives and compression, before or after modulation to taste, and into reverb rather than out of it. On boards where the ARP-87 has been documented it most often sits with Walrus’s own Fathom, Julia and Slö, a PolyTune 3, an Xotic SP Compressor and an Ibanez Tube Screamer Mini — a fairly classic modern indie-and-session layout. Because it is buffered, it also works fine at the end of a long cable run.
Who Should Buy This Pedal
Buy the ARP-87 if you play to a click or to a drummer with good time, if you want a genuinely characterful lo-fi delay voice without menu-diving, if you value expressive footswitch gestures over stored presets, and if you like the idea of a delay that sits underneath the band rather than on top of it. It is a superb pedal for post-rock, ambient, indie, worship and session work, and it is priced fairly for what it does.
Do not buy it if you set delay times by ear, if you switch delay voices mid-song, if you need stereo or MIDI, or if what you actually want is the specific bucket-brigade grit of a Memory Man. It is also not the pedal for anyone chasing a very specific famous delay tone — the David Gilmour “present but subtle” sound is one owners repeatedly report struggling to reach on this pedal, and there is no shame in buying a purpose-built box for that instead.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does the Walrus Audio ARP-87 have a delay time knob?
No. This is the pedal’s defining design decision. Delay time is set exclusively by the tap tempo footswitch, divided by whichever subdivision you select on the Ratio knob. There is an external tap jack if you prefer to place the tap switch elsewhere on your board, but there is no way to dial a delay time in by hand.
Is the ARP-87 analog or digital?
Digital. The delay engine is a Spin Semiconductor FV-1 DSP chip. The “Analog” program is a digital emulation of a bucket-brigade voice, not an actual analog delay line. Walrus has never claimed otherwise, but it is a common point of confusion.
What is the hidden fifth algorithm and how do I access it?
It is a tremolo-delay hybrid that runs inside Slap mode. To reach it, turn the Program knob fully counterclockwise, hold the tap tempo switch down, and then turn the Program knob fully clockwise. It is not documented in the manual, which is why plenty of owners find it by accident and briefly assume the pedal is broken.
Is the ARP-87 true bypass?
No — it is buffered, using relay-based “smart bypass” switching. Several online databases claim true bypass; the manufacturer’s own specification says Buffered. You can choose between trails and no-trails behaviour by holding the bypass switch for one second while applying power.
Does the ARP-87 work in stereo?
No. It has one mono input, one mono output and a third jack for external tap or expression duties. There is no stereo operation and no MIDI. If stereo delay is a requirement, look at Walrus’s Meraki or a flagship like the Strymon TimeLine.
Which famous guitarists actually use the ARP-87?
Documented users include Mateus Asato, Tommy Guerrero, Todd Gummerman of Mutemath, Ariel Posen, Denver Dalley of Desaparecidos, Jonny Ashburn of Caspian, Dan O’Connor of Four Year Strong and Grayson Stewart of Norma Jean. It does not include The Edge, David Gilmour, John Frusciante, Andy Summers or Steve Vai — that list circulates widely online and is a recycled generic delay roster with no evidence behind it for this pedal.
What is the maximum delay time?
1000 milliseconds, which is a hard limit of the FV-1 architecture. That is ample for eighth and dotted-eighth work at any realistic tempo, but it will not give you the very long ambient washes a Strymon TimeLine or an EarthQuaker Avalanche Run can reach.
Is the ARP-87 still made, and is it worth buying in 2026?
Yes, it is still in Walrus Audio’s Core Series and widely stocked. At a street price of $186.99 — currently an all-time low — it is good value if the tap-only workflow suits you, and used units from around $135 make it a genuine bargain. Try the tap switch before you commit, because that is the one thing that decides whether this pedal works for you.