Every delay pedal has a memory. That is literally what a delay is — a machine that holds a sound for a moment and then gives it back. What separates one echo box from another is usually how long it holds on, and how badly the sound gets scuffed on the way through.
The Chase Bliss Habit takes that premise and does something faintly unsettling with it. Underneath the six knobs and the four toggles there is a three-minute digital tape reel that never stops running. Everything you play into the pedal goes onto it. Not the good bits — everything. The warm-up licks, the accidental open string, the riff you abandoned ninety seconds ago because it wasn’t going anywhere. And then, at a moment of its own choosing or yours, Habit reaches back into that reel, pulls out a fragment, and drops it into the room on top of what you are playing right now.
Chase Bliss called it an “Echo Collector.” Premier Guitar, reviewing it in September 2022, decided it “could just as easily be classified as a delay-adjacent device as an echo pedal.” Guitar.com’s Richard Purvis opened his review by calling it “a highly unconventional delay pedal — in the same way an elephant is a highly unconventional insect.” Nobody, including the people who built it, has ever managed a one-sentence description that holds up.
And as of 2026, you can’t buy a new one. Chase Bliss’s own product page now carries a single flat line above the photograph: Habit has been discontinued and is no longer for sale. That changes what this article is for. This is no longer a piece about whether to add a pedal to your board. It is a piece about a machine that existed for four years, did something nothing else on the market did, and is now a used-market proposition — which means knowing exactly what it does, and exactly where it will frustrate you, matters more than it ever did when you could just send it back.
Where Habit Came From
Chase Bliss Audio is Joel Korte’s company, based in Anoka, Minnesota — a small operation that has spent its entire existence building pedals that are, by any reasonable industry standard, commercially insane. Every unit is a dense little slab of knobs, toggles and rear-panel dip switches, made in the USA, priced at the top of the boutique bracket, and documented in manuals that read like zines.
Habit’s specific origin story is one Chase Bliss has told itself: the pedal was sketched out on a train to Berlin that broke down. The company built a short documentary around that anecdote. It is a good story precisely because it explains the product — this is not a design that emerged from a market-gap analysis. It is a design that emerged from someone with nothing to do for several hours and a notebook.
The other name that matters here is Scott Harper. Harper runs Knobs, the YouTube channel known for demoing pedals without ever saying a word over the top of them. He collaborated with Chase Bliss on the Blooper and by the time Habit arrived he was the company’s full-time director of product development. Guitar.com noted the obvious implication at the time: Harper “is not there to make Tube Screamers.”
Habit landed in spring 2022 — the manual carries a March 2022 date, Guitar.com’s review ran on 14 April 2022, Premier Guitar’s on 12 September 2022. It slotted into a family. MOOD is the micro-looper. Blooper is the bottomless looper. Habit is the delay with a memory. Chase Bliss got asked about the overlap often enough that they built a dedicated comparison page on their own site to head the question off.
Specifications
How Habit Actually Works
The manual opens with a diagram it tells you to come back to whenever you start feeling “WTF” — the word is theirs. The diagram is one line: INPUT goes to MEMORY goes to ECHO goes to OUTPUT. The memory holds three minutes, from “NOW” back to “3 MIN AGO.” Everything Habit does is a consequence of that chain, and if you understand the chain you can stop being surprised by the pedal.
The top row: a normal delay
Level, Repeats and Size behave exactly as you would expect from any digital delay, and Chase Bliss says so plainly. Level sets echo volume. Repeats sets the number of echoes, topping out at stable infinite build-up rather than runaway self-oscillation. Size is delay time, from 50 ms up to a full sixty seconds, and — importantly — it adjusts cleanly, with no Doppler pitch warping as you turn it. That last detail is what separates Habit from a tape-emulation pedal like the Strymon El Capistan, where dragging the time knob is half the point.
The single most useful sentence in the entire manual: if you want a classic delay experience, leave Scan at minimum. If you are ever confused about what the pedal is doing, bringing Scan back to zero will settle things down. Write it on a bit of tape and stick it to the enclosure.
Modify: six ways to damage an echo
The Modify knob is neutral at noon and does different things clockwise and counter-clockwise. Which of the six modifiers is active depends on two toggles — bank A or B, then position 1, 2 or 3.
A1 Stepped Speed changes echo speed and direction in steps tuned to octaves and fifths, so it stays harmonious. Forward to the right, reverse to the left, stopped in the middle, up to 4× either way. A2 Stability is the tape modifier: wow, flutter and filtering, with tape noise added clockwise and no noise counter-clockwise. A3 Trimmer cuts a portion off each echo, rhythmically synced to Size — a genuinely different way of getting something like delay subdivisions.
B1 Smooth Speed is Stepped Speed unquantised, which is where detune, chorus and melting-tape textures live, up to 2× in either direction. B2 Filter is a simple multi-mode filter, low-pass left and high-pass right — with a warning attached, since resonance can pile up and oscillate in the IN and FEED routings. B3 Dropper introduces playback errors, brief silences, patterned clockwise and random counter-clockwise, going granular at maximum.
IN, OUT and FEED: the toggle that changes everything
This is the control most new owners underuse, and it matters more than any knob.
OUT puts the modifier at the delay’s output. Every echo gets the same treatment. Consistent, predictable, and the setting to use when you want an effect rather than an event.
IN puts the modifier inside the feedback loop. Each echo gets modified again, and again, so the effect accumulates. This is where Stepped Speed produces cascading intervals rather than a single pitch shift, and where Filter can be driven into oscillation.
FEED routes Habit’s output back to its input. Everything you hear — echoes, knob turns, modifier changes, the lot — gets written into the memory. The Repeats knob stops controlling just the echo and starts controlling feedback for the whole system. Echoes take on a metallic, blurry quality as they decay. The manual’s own summary of FEED is not a specification, it is a shrug: “It’s your mystery to explore.”
Scan: the thing nothing else does
Scan is Habit’s actual invention, and it has two completely different personalities depending on one dip switch.
In Auto — the factory default — Habit decides. The knob sets how often the pedal will wander off into its own memory and how far back it will go. Low settings give you the occasional odd departure. Maximum means it is scanning constantly. Because the knob also sets depth, low settings tend to stay harmonious while high settings will cheerfully drop in a phrase from a different key you played two minutes ago.
In Manual — dip switch engaged — you decide. The knob becomes a time offset reaching up to a full three minutes back. Minimum plays the present; turning it up walks backwards through your own history. Guitar.com described it well: the scan knob becomes “like a radio dial spinning through the last sixty seconds of your recorded history.” While the knob is moving you hear a cloudy scrubbing effect, because you are physically travelling past every sound in the memory. When it stops, you hear things exactly as you played them.
The trap, and Chase Bliss documents it in its own FAQ: switch the pedal on in Manual mode with Scan turned up and you will hear nothing at all, because the memory is empty and you have just asked the pedal to echo something that does not exist yet. People return perfectly functional pedals over this.
Spread: being in two places at once
Spread adds a second play head. It shares Size and Repeats with the primary echo but reads a different point in the memory, and the knob sets how far behind the first echo it sits — right back to the full three minutes if you want. Short settings give you genuinely unusual multi-tap patterns; long settings mean your playing from a minute ago accompanies your playing now. Because Spread and Scan are both locked to Size, whatever you build stays rhythmically coherent, provided you have not changed Size in the interval. Flick the routing toggle to FEED and Spread produces a more familiar recirculating multi-tap, because the gap between the two heads starts repeating.
Collect: the twelve-minute song machine
Engage the Collect dip switch and the memory starts overdubbing itself. Since the memory is always three minutes long and always recording, what you played three minutes ago comes back and combines with what you are playing now — and then again three minutes after that.
Chase Bliss’s manual includes an actual step-by-step recipe for this, and it is one of the more charming things any pedal company has printed. Three minutes of foundation, staying in one key and following the delay’s rhythm. Three minutes of harmony, responding to the layer you just made. Three minutes of tweaking the controls with the instrument put down, staying in IN or OUT so the memory stays clean. Then three minutes in FEED, where every knob move gets committed to the recording. The manual’s heading for the final step is simply: “A strange song, in 12 minutes.”
Famous Players: What We Could Actually Verify
Habit is a four-year-old boutique pedal aimed squarely at experimental players, so the honest starting position is that the documented user list is short. It is also worth stating up front that the source data behind this article’s ranking carried no artist claim at all for the Habit — which, in our experience, is a more reliable signal than a list of names, because lists of names attached to specialist pedals are usually generic rosters pasted on by someone who never checked.
Dave Harrington (Darkside) — confirmed, on camera, with a date
The one solid, first-party-adjacent citation is a good one. Premier Guitar’s Chris Kies filmed a Rig Rundown with Darkside guitarist Dave Harrington at Nashville’s Brooklyn Bowl, published 23 April 2025, on the tour behind the album Nothing. The write-up names the Habit explicitly as part of the board at Harrington’s feet.
It is worth listing the company it keeps, because it tells you exactly what kind of player buys this pedal. On that board alongside the Habit: a Mu-Tron Micro-Tron IV, an Eventide-adjacent pair in the PitchFactor and H90, a Hologram Microcosm, a Hologram Chroma Console, a Walrus Monument, a Chase Bliss Thermae, a Chase Bliss Brothers AM, a JHS NOTAKLÖN, two HexeFX reVOLVERs and an Amped Innovations JJJ Special Harmonics Extender. A Strymon Ojai powers the lot.
Harrington’s second board carries two Electro-Harmonix 45000 multi-track looping recorders, an Expedition Electronics 60 Second Deluxe and a second Microcosm; underneath sits his Line 6 DL4, which he describes as his desert-island pedal. He runs three amps — two Fender Twin Reverbs and a Hot Rod DeVille — with each one handling a single signal, so that loops and live playing do not compete for frequency space. His guitar is a mid-2000s Gibson SG bought at 30th Street Guitars in New York, with a round knob installed behind the bridge by his tech that works as an expression control for the DL4.
That is the context Habit was built for: a player who never gives up on a pedal, running three boards of overlapping memory devices, improvising as the default mode. Harrington is not currently covered in our guitarist archive, so he gets named here rather than linked.
Lineage, not usership
Chase Bliss’s own marketing copy for the 60-second delay time name-checks Frippertronics. That is a genuine and useful reference — but it is a reference to a technique, not a claim that anyone in particular used this pedal, and the distinction matters.
Robert Fripp built Frippertronics in the 1970s out of two reel-to-reel Revoxes and a length of tape, with Brian Eno’s help. Terry Riley’s Time Lag Accumulator experiments got there earlier. Eno’s Discreet Music diagram is essentially a schematic for the same idea. What all of those share with Habit is the principle that long, degrading repetition stops being an echo and starts being a compositional environment — where you lose track of where the loop starts, and where your past playing crashes into your present playing.
What none of them share with Habit is that they used Habit. Fripp’s system predates the pedal by roughly half a century. When you see the Frippertronics reference in Chase Bliss’s copy, read it as an honest statement of ancestry, not a celebrity endorsement.
What we could not verify
Social-media board photographs, aggregator listings and forum reports turn up a number of further names. None of them reached the standard we use here — a dated first-party source, a manufacturer artist page, or a filmed rig rundown. They are therefore not in this article. If you find a Habit on a board in a photograph, that is evidence that pedal was on that board on that day; it is not evidence of a working relationship, and we would rather run a short honest list than a long decorative one.
Eight Settings Worth Dialling In
1. The pedal you can put on a covers gig
Scan at minimum, Spread at minimum, modifier toggle to OFF, all dip switches off, routing to OUT. Level around 9 o’clock, Repeats around 10, Size tapped in with the left footswitch. This is a clean, low-noise digital delay and nothing more. Start every session here.
2. Tape delay, the honest version
Modifier A2 Stability, routing IN, Modify knob clockwise from noon to bring in wow, flutter and tape hiss. Counter-clockwise gives you the same wobble with no noise if you would rather keep it quiet. In IN routing the degradation accumulates with each repeat, which is exactly what a real bucket-brigade or tape machine does.
3. Cascading fifths and octaves
Modifier A1 Stepped Speed, routing IN, Modify clockwise. Each repeat is pitched further than the last and the echoes climb away in tuned intervals. Set routing to OUT instead and you get one flat pitch shift on every repeat — useful, but a completely different effect. Reverse the knob past noon and the whole cascade runs backwards.
4. Auto-stutter subdivisions
Modifier A3 Trimmer, routing OUT, Modify to taste. Because Trimmer is synced to Size, this gives you chopped rhythmic fragments that stay locked to the delay tempo — a genuine alternative to the dotted-eighth-plus-quarter approach that a conventional multi-tap delay would use.
5. Reverse delay
Modifier A1 Stepped Speed, routing OUT, Modify turned left of noon to the reverse side. The manual’s entire description of this setting is the word “Totally,” printed backwards. It works.
6. The radio-dial improvisation
Manual dip switch on. Play for two or three minutes to fill the memory, then stop and start moving the Scan knob. You are now scrubbing through your own recent past. Park it in a region to pull out coherent phrases; keep it moving for a blurred, abstract wash. Turn Repeats all the way up first and the fragments you find will stack up and hold, which is the “loop collecting” technique the manual describes — you are effectively hunting through your own playing for the bits worth keeping.
7. Harmonising with yourself from a minute ago
Spread turned well up, Scan at minimum, Repeats moderate, Size set and then left alone. The secondary echo now plays what you did roughly a minute back. Because Size and Spread stay rhythmically linked, the old material remains in sync with the present — provided you have not touched Size in the meantime. Break that one rule and the whole thing falls apart, which is the trade-off.
8. Full Habit
Routing to FEED, Repeats high, Spread up, Scan in Manual. Loop a phrase by holding the bypass footswitch, improvise over the top, and because FEED is writing the output back into the memory, the loop and your improvisation both get recorded. Then use Scan to navigate back and find what you played, re-loop that, and play over it again. This is the recursion that makes Habit unlike anything else, and it is also where the pedal will eventually clip — Chase Bliss’s own FAQ recommends running it on a send with the input level dropped and the output boosted back up.
How Habit Compares
vs. Chase Bliss Blooper
The closest sibling and the most common confusion. Blooper is a looper that mangles loops you deliberately record — you tap record, you decide what goes in, you have layers and undo. Habit is a delay whose memory records whether you asked it to or not, and which has no layers, no undo, and no defined loop length. Blooper is a compositional tool you drive. Habit is a compositional tool that occasionally drives you. Chase Bliss found this question so common they wrote a comparison page rather than keep answering it.
vs. Chase Bliss MOOD
MOOD is the micro-looper: a very short buffer, granular and reverb-adjacent processing, immediate and tactile. Habit’s buffer is three minutes rather than a few seconds, which changes the effect from a texture into a memory. MOOD is about what just happened. Habit is about what happened a while ago.
vs. Strymon Timeline / Volante
Not really a contest, because they are answering different questions. The Timeline is the studio-grade all-rounder — 200 presets, every delay type, total recall, and a device you can build a professional show around. The Volante is a beautifully executed magnetic-echo emulation with a looper attached. Habit has two presets and a knob layout you will forget by next week. If you need to hit the same sound at the same bar every night, buy the Strymon. If you want a pedal that puts something unexpected in front of you, that is not what a Strymon is for.
vs. Hologram Microcosm
The most interesting comparison, and the one most likely to be a genuine either/or. The Microcosm is a granular effects and looping machine with a bank of named, curated algorithms; you audition presets and pick one. Habit gives you six modifiers and one architectural idea, and expects you to build the sound yourself. Microcosm is more immediately gratifying and far easier to use on stage. Habit rewards weeks of work. Notably, Dave Harrington runs both — two Microcosms, in fact — which suggests they are not really substitutes at all.
vs. Eventide Space and the Factor series
The Eventide Space and TimeFactor are deep, programmable, MIDI-capable studio devices in footswitch form, with a hundred presets and total repeatability. They are also, importantly, centre-positive power with a 2.5 mm barrel, where Habit is standard centre-negative on 2.1 mm — a detail that has ruined more than one pedal on more than one board. Functionally, the Eventides do more kinds of thing. Habit does one kind of thing nothing else does.
vs. Montreal Assembly Count to Five and Red Panda Particle
Premier Guitar placed Habit “somewhere alongside glitchy pedals like the Montreal Assembly Count to Five and Red Panda Tensor,” and Guitar.com’s “like this? try these” list named the Count to Five and the Particle 2. That is the right neighbourhood — sample-mangling, buffer-scrubbing, deliberately unpredictable. Habit’s distinguishing feature within that group is the sheer length of its memory. Three minutes is not a buffer, it is a rehearsal.
Buying Guide: A Discontinued Pedal
Habit launched at $399 street in the US and £399 in the UK. It ran for roughly four years before Chase Bliss retired it — the company’s own product page now says only that it has been discontinued and is no longer for sale. There was a limited farewell run in early 2026 that sold out to newsletter subscribers, which is a fairly typical Chase Bliss move and not something to plan around.
That leaves the used market, where prices have been sitting broadly around and above the original street price rather than below it. This is worth understanding clearly: a discontinued Chase Bliss pedal does not usually get cheaper. Warped Vinyl and Tonal Recall history suggests the opposite.
What to check on a used unit. First, the dip switches. There are sixteen of them and they are tiny, delicate, and easy to snap with a screwdriver used impatiently. Physically inspect every one and confirm each toggles cleanly. Second, run through all six modifiers in both bank positions and both IN and OUT routings — a fault in one DSP mode is not obvious if the seller only demoed the basic delay. Third, save and recall both presets, since preset storage is a hold-both-footswitches ritual and worth confirming it works. Fourth, check the micro-USB jack physically; it is firmware-only and you will rarely use it, but a broken port means the pedal can never be updated. Fifth, ask whether the memory clears cleanly with both footswitches at once.
Power. 9V DC, centre negative, around 150 mA. No battery option, ever. That is a hungry pedal by isolated-supply standards — plan a dedicated 250 mA or higher output rather than daisy-chaining it. Do not assume other Chase Bliss pedals on your board draw the same; they do not, and the figure varies meaningfully across the range.
Who should actually buy one. Guitar.com’s verdict was blunt and correct: “should everybody buy one? Lawks a lordy, no.” This is a particular pedal for a particular kind of playing. It positively encourages aimless noodling — you need at least three minutes of material for the memory to have anything to give back — and in the wrong hands it will produce an entire set that sounds like a pedal demo. If you play songs with arrangements and need the same sound at the same moment every night, this is not your pedal and the used premium is not your money well spent. If you improvise, work in ambient or experimental territory, record alone, or want a machine that occasionally makes a decision you would not have made, there is nothing else quite like it.
Living With It
Premier Guitar scored the Habit 3.9 and listed three cons: steep learning curve, abstract functionality, and the need to keep notes. All three are fair and none of them are faults exactly — they are the cost of the design.
The notes point deserves expanding. With six knobs, four toggles, sixteen dip switches and a hidden layer of preferences accessed by holding both footswitches while waking up the middle toggles, the number of possible states is enormous and the number you will remember is about four. Two preset slots is not many. Most owners end up keeping an actual notebook next to the board, which PG rightly noted “isn’t everyone’s idea of fun.”
The dip switches are not gig hardware. They are small, they require precision, and if the pedal is velcroed to a board you may not be able to reach the rear panel at all. Decide your Manual-versus-Auto scan preference and your Collect setting at home, save them into a preset, and leave them alone.
Two behaviours catch people out repeatedly, and both are documented by Chase Bliss rather than hidden. One: bypassing the pedal dumps the memory and starts fresh, unless Collect or Always are engaged. If you have spent five minutes building something and you tap bypass out of habit, it is gone. Two: distortion. Because Habit lets sound pile up indefinitely, you will eventually hit clipping, and sooner with synths or drum machines than with a guitar. The company’s own recommended fix is to run it on an effects send with the input attenuated.
Finally, the Always dip switch has a safety mechanism worth knowing about. Always tells the memory to keep recording even when the pedal is bypassed, so you can fill it up silently and switch on to a full three minutes of material. To stop that from turning into a speaker-destroying accumulation if you leave the pedal off for a week, Chase Bliss made Always disable Collect and limit Repeats while bypassed. Everything returns to normal when the pedal is on.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is the Chase Bliss Habit still in production?
No. Chase Bliss discontinued the Habit and its own product page states plainly that it is no longer for sale. It ran for roughly four years from its spring 2022 launch. A small limited farewell edition was offered to newsletter subscribers in early 2026 and sold out. New units are gone; the pedal is a used-market item now.
How long is the Habit’s delay?
Up to 60 seconds, from a minimum of 50 ms. That is the echo. Separately and additionally, the pedal keeps a three-minute internal memory of everything you have played, which the Scan and Spread knobs read from. The two figures are different things and are often confused.
Can the Habit be used as a normal delay pedal?
Yes, and it is good at it. Set Scan and Spread to minimum, put the modifier toggle to OFF and leave the dip switches alone, and you have a clean digital delay with a low noise floor controlled by three knobs. Chase Bliss explicitly recommends starting there. The pedal only gets strange when you ask it to.
My Habit is on but I can’t hear any effect. Is it broken?
Almost certainly not. This is the single most common complaint and Chase Bliss answers it in their own FAQ. If the Manual dip switch is on and Scan is turned up, you are asking the pedal to echo a moment from a memory that is still empty because you just switched it on. Turn Scan down to minimum, play for a while to fill the memory, then explore.
Why am I hearing things I didn’t just play?
Intended behaviour, from one of two causes: the Collect dip switch is on, meaning the memory is overdubbing itself and material from three minutes ago is coming back around; or Scan or Spread are turned up, meaning the pedal is deliberately reading from an earlier point in the memory. Both are the pedal working correctly.
What’s the difference between Habit, Blooper and MOOD?
Blooper is a looper you deliberately record into, with layers and undo. MOOD is a micro-looper with a very short buffer, used as a texture. Habit is a delay with a passive three-minute memory that records continuously whether you asked it to or not. Chase Bliss got this question often enough to build a dedicated comparison page on their site.
Does the Habit need special power?
No, but check the current draw. It is standard 9V DC centre negative on a 2.1 mm barrel — unlike Eventide’s Factor pedals, which are centre positive on a 2.5 mm barrel — but it draws roughly 150 mA, which is more than many isolated supply outputs provide. Give it its own healthy output. There is no battery option.
What do the 16 dip switches do?
Broadly, half of them assign which knobs respond to an expression pedal, CV, or the pedal’s internal ramping and bounce modulation. The other half are behaviour options: Manual (changes Scan from auto to manual), Collect (memory overdubs itself), Dry Kill, Always (record while bypassed), Latch (loop function becomes latching rather than momentary), and Wipe (mutes the echo so you hear only the memory). Dip switch settings are saved along with your presets. There is a further hidden layer — Dry Kill type, Memory Dry behaviour and Trails — reached by holding both footswitches and moving the middle toggles.