In 2009, Jeorge Tripps was asked by Premier Guitar whether he would ever reissue the Aqua-Puss, the sky-blue analog delay he had built in tiny numbers during Way Huge’s first life in the 1990s. His answer, quoted in the magazine’s March 2009 issue, was not the answer of a man planning a triumphant return. It was four words that ought to be printed on the box: “Why would you want a 300ms analog delay?”
He was, on paper, right. Three hundred milliseconds is nothing. It is roughly the gap between two syllables. It is a third of a second, which means that at 120 bpm you cannot get a quarter-note repeat out of it, you cannot get a dotted eighth at anything slower than a brisk punk tempo, and you certainly cannot build the kind of cathedral of decaying echoes that people were buying delay pedals for in 2009. By every metric that the spec-sheet era cared about, the Aqua-Puss was obsolete before it was reissued.
And then the internet lost its mind, forum threads filled up with people begging, the pedal came back at Winter NAMM 2010, and it has been in continuous production in one form or another ever since. The version in front of us — the Aqua-Puss Analog Delay MkIII, catalogue number WM71, the one in the little Way Huge Smalls box — is the third act of that story, and it is arguably the version that finally makes the argument properly. Because the whole point of the Aqua-Puss is that its limitation is the feature, and putting a pedal whose entire identity is “does one thing, does it beautifully, occupies a small conceptual space” into an enclosure that occupies a small physical space is the most coherent thing Dunlop has ever done with the design.
Housekeeping: what this pedal is, what it is not, and one spec you will see quoted that is simply wrong
The category label on this one is honest, which is not always the case. It is a delay pedal. It delays things. Nobody has tried to sell it as a reverb or a modulation box.
But two other things do need untangling before we go further, and both of them cost people money.
First, the Mk numbering. Unlike the Green Rhino — whose version numbers run in an order that has nothing to do with feature progression, as covered in our Way Huge Green Rhino MkV guide — the Aqua-Puss numbering is refreshingly linear. The MkI is the 1990s original, built in the Way Huge workshop between roughly 1993 and 1999 in extremely small numbers, catalogued variously as the AP1 and AP2 depending on board revision. The MkII is the 2010 Dunlop-era reissue in the full-size bent-steel chassis. The MkIII is this one, the 2018 Smalls-format version. Three versions, three eras, in order. Enjoy it, because the rest of the Way Huge catalogue is not like this.
Second, the dimensions. If you look this pedal up on Equipboard, the spec block lists it as 2.5 inches high, 3.25 inches wide, and 4.78 inches deep. That is a pedal roughly the footprint of a Boss compact and taller than one. It is not what you will receive. A Way Huge Smalls enclosure is a genuinely miniature box — narrower than a Boss compact by a comfortable margin and short enough that two of them fit in the space of one standard pedal. What that spec block is describing is almost certainly the shipping carton, and the figure has propagated because Dunlop publishes no enclosure dimensions in the WM71 manual, so there is nothing authoritative for aggregators to check it against.
This is the second time in two Way Huge articles that we have caught the same failure. The Green Rhino MkV is listed on the same site at 2.3 × 3.7 × 4.9 inches, which is likewise impossible for a Smalls pedal. If you are planning a board around this thing, trust the format, not the aggregator: it is a Smalls, it will take up about two-thirds of the width of a Boss compact, and it has top-mounted jacks in the sense that matters — it will not eat the row behind it.
Where the Aqua-Puss came from: 419 pedals, a used-car down payment, and a designer who said no
Way Huge Electronics existed as an independent operation from 1992 to 1999. Jeorge Tripps built the pedals largely by hand, in numbers that look absurd from a modern vantage point — the Green Rhino, the company’s best seller, managed 419 units across its entire original lifespan. The Aqua-Puss was not the best seller. Do the arithmetic on what that means for the surviving population.
When Tripps wound the company down in 1999 and the pedals stopped being made, something predictable and then something unpredictable happened. The predictable part: prices went up. The unpredictable part: they went up an order of magnitude. Jordan Wagner’s 2010 Premier Guitar review of the MkII opens with a personal anecdote that has become the standard illustration of the phenomenon — he bought an original Aqua-Puss used in the early 2000s for “well over a few hundred dollars,” held it for years, and then sold it. The proceeds from selling that one used delay pedal were enough to make the down payment on a car.
That is the market Tripps was declining to serve when he made the “why would you want a 300ms analog delay?” remark. He had already been through the reissue process once with the Swollen Pickle Jumbo Fuzz MkII, which was a hit, and the received wisdom inside the company appears to have been that the delay was the one pedal in the catalogue whose reputation was doing more work than its spec sheet could support. He left the door open on the condition that demand justified it.
Demand justified it. The MkII debuted at Winter NAMM 2010 at a street price of $149, helped along — as Premier Guitar noted at the time — by a photo of one that John Mayer had posted to Twitter. It scored 4 out of 5. And the review contains the single most useful piece of information anyone has ever published about this pedal, which is Tripps’ explanation of a “flaw” that turned out to be deliberate.
Wagner noticed that at higher delay-time settings there is a faint whine riding over the repeats — clock noise, the bucket-brigade chip’s sampling clock bleeding into the audio path. On his old Ibanez AD-9 he would trim it out with a screwdriver. He assumed it was a defect. Tripps told him it was not: the clock whine was left in on purpose, because that is what old analog delays sound like, in the same way that a tape echo has a slight warble. It is a design decision to preserve a period-correct artefact that most modern builders spend money engineering out.
Eight years later, at Winter NAMM 2018, Tripps and Way Huge announced the Smalls-format MkIII. And the crucial detail — confirmed at the time via Way Huge’s own Instagram and picked up by the pedal-modding community, who cared about it a great deal — is that the shrunken version kept the MN3205 bucket-brigade chip. It is not a re-engineering. It is the same delay line in a smaller box. First units shipped through Musician’s Friend and Guitar Center in late February and early March 2018.
Specifications: Way Huge Aqua-Puss Analog Delay MkIII (WM71)
| Specification | Figure |
|---|---|
| Model number | WM71 |
| Full name | Way Huge Smalls Aqua-Puss Analog Delay MkIII |
| Type | All-analog bucket-brigade delay |
| Delay line | MN3205 BBD (carried over from the MkII) |
| Delay range | 20 ms to 300 ms |
| Controls | Delay, Feedback, Blend |
| Footswitch | On/bypass, blue LED indicates effect engaged |
| Bypass | True hardwire relay |
| Input impedance | > 300 kΩ |
| Output impedance | < 1 kΩ |
| Nominal output | −20 dBV |
| Signal-to-noise ratio | > 96 dB (A-weighted) |
| Noise reduction ratio | 2:1 (companding) |
| Delay distortion | ≤ 1% |
| Current draw | 16 mA |
| Power supply | 9 V DC |
| Power connector | 5.5 mm × 2.1 mm, positive voltage on outer sleeve (centre negative) |
| Battery | Yes — single 9 V; pedal locks into bypass when the battery is low |
| Protection | Power-protection circuitry against AC supplies |
| Recommended supplies | Dunlop ECB003, DC Brick, Iso-Brick, Mini Iso-Brick |
| Enclosure | Way Huge Smalls format |
| Announced | Winter NAMM 2018 (shipping late Feb / early Mar 2018) |
| MSRP (Dunlop, Sept 2026) | $179.99 |
All electrical measurements are Dunlop’s own, taken from the WM71 manual with controls at centre. Note the two figures that people skip past: signal-to-noise better than 96 dB and delay distortion at or under 1%. For a bucket-brigade circuit that is genuinely quiet, and it is quiet because of the 2:1 companding — the signal is compressed on the way into the delay line and expanded on the way out, which is how every good BBD design keeps the noise floor down. That companding is also part of why analog repeats sound the way they do.
Three knobs, and what each one is actually doing
Delay
Sets the time between the dry note and the first repeat, from 20 ms at full counter-clockwise to 300 ms at full clockwise. In a bucket-brigade delay this control is not a digital time parameter — it is changing the clock frequency that shuffles the signal through the chip’s capacitor stages. Slower clock, longer delay, and also darker and grainier repeats, because the effective sampling rate has dropped. This is why an analog delay’s longest settings always sound the most degraded, and why the Aqua-Puss’s clock whine appears at the top of the range rather than the bottom.
The practical map: 8 to 10 o’clock is slapback in the rockabilly sense, tight enough that it reads as thickening rather than as a distinct echo. Noon to 1 o’clock is a clear, separate repeat — doubling territory. 2 to 3 o’clock is where you can get something like a dotted-eighth pattern at faster tempos, which is as close as this pedal gets to the rhythmic-delay world that The Edge made standard. Full clockwise is 300 ms, the grainiest setting, and the one where the clock whine is audible on quiet passages.
Feedback
Sets the number of repeats by feeding the delayed signal back into the input of the delay line. Dunlop’s manual is unusually blunt about the top of this control: “beware! Extreme settings are known to throw this pedal into wild, space-and-time-warping self-oscillation.”
They are not exaggerating, and this is one of the two things the MkIII is genuinely prized for. Owner discussion on r/guitarpedals repeatedly singles out the self-oscillation as a standout feature rather than a party trick, and describes the pedal as favoured over Way Huge’s own Echo Puss specifically for what happens at the top of the Feedback range. Because the delay time is short, the runaway oscillation is high and metallic rather than the slow bloom you get out of a long delay — closer to a theremin than to a cave.
The counterpoint, and it matters: because the maximum delay is only 300 ms, the repeats stack up very quickly. One long-form owner review on Equipboard makes the point precisely — even at minimum Feedback you get a clearly audible first repeat, and they multiply fast. Feedback on this pedal is not a “how long does the tail last” control in the way it is on a 600 ms delay. It is closer to a density control.
Blend
Sets the ratio of dry to delayed signal. And this is the control that people set wrong.
The same Equipboard reviewer — a 45-year-old rock and pop player who rated the pedal 5 stars and clearly uses it constantly — offers the most useful setting advice published anywhere on this pedal: Blend becomes REALLY audible very quickly, and between 9 and 10 o’clock you have everything you need. Above that you are into washed-out territory, which is a real and legitimate sound but a specific one. Below, at around 8:30, you get something subtle but still clearly present. That is a tiny usable window on a full 270-degree knob rotation, and if you have ever tried an Aqua-Puss in a shop and found it overbearing, this is almost certainly why.
What 300 milliseconds actually buys you, and why the limit is the point
The Aqua-Puss argument gets made badly all the time, usually as vague appeals to warmth. Here is the version with mechanisms in it.
A delay repeat that arrives less than about 40 ms after the dry note does not read to the ear as a separate event. It reads as a change in the tone and body of the original note — the two events fuse. That is what is happening at the bottom of the Delay range, and it is why the Aqua-Puss at 9 o’clock sounds like a thicker guitar rather than like a guitar with an echo. You are not adding an effect; you are adding a second, slightly delayed, slightly degraded copy of yourself to your own dry signal, which is the same trick as double-tracking a rhythm part in the studio.
Between roughly 40 and 120 ms the repeat separates out and becomes an audible slapback — the sound of a 1950s Sun Records vocal, of surf guitar, of every country lead ever played. Above about 150 ms you are into echo proper, and the Aqua-Puss gives you another 150 ms of that before it runs out.
Now the second mechanism, which is the one Wagner identified in the Premier Guitar review and which nobody explains as clearly: analog delays add a small amount of even-order distortion to each repeat. Not the harsh odd-order harmonics of a clipping circuit — the gentle, musically consonant kind. Combined with the natural high-frequency roll-off of a bucket-brigade line, each successive repeat is warmer, softer and slightly more saturated than the one before it. Stack four of those under a dry note and you get exactly what Wagner described: a tone that takes on “the same sorts of qualities that make vintage recordings sound so inviting.”
That is why the Aqua-Puss survived its own obsolescence. Nobody bought one in 2010 because they needed 300 ms. They bought one because a short, warm, harmonically-active repeat is a tone-shaping tool disguised as a time-based effect. It belongs in the same conceptual bucket as a Strymon Deco or a plate reverb: something you leave on.
Famous players: what holds up, what doesn’t, and one honest correction
This is the section where most gear writing goes wrong, because the Aqua-Puss name covers three quite different pedals and almost every artist credit you will find attaches to the MkII or the original — not to the WM71 in question. So let us separate them properly.
Verified on the MkIII specifically
Christone “Kingfish” Ingram is the strongest MkIII credit on record. Equipboard’s entry cites a video in which Ingram discusses his Way Huge Aqua-Puss MkIII by name, at a specific timestamp — this is a player talking about the pedal, not a photograph someone squinted at.
But we should be straight about the current state of his rig, because it has changed. Ingram’s touring pedalboard as covered by Premier Guitar, MusicRadar and Guitar.com is now famously minimal: four pedals, assembled by Barry O’Neal of Nashville’s XAct Tone Solutions, comprising a Boss TU-3W tuner, a Dunlop Cry Baby Mini wah, a Marshall ShredMaster with the gain pinned, and a Boss DD-3-family delay for the time-based duties. He has said plainly that he is “simple when it comes to pedals.” So the accurate statement is: Kingfish has owned and discussed the Aqua-Puss MkIII, and it is not on his current live board. Anyone telling you the MkIII is a Kingfish live-rig staple is overselling it. Read our Christone “Kingfish” Ingram gear guide for the full picture.
Buzz Osborne of the Melvins is credited with MkIII use on the basis of a photograph, with the submitting contributor’s note reading, in full, “buzz uses the smalls mk3 sometimes too.” That is honest sourcing and we will report it honestly: it is a photo-based credit with a hedge attached, from a guitarist whose main board has historically been built around much larger machinery. Osborne does not have a guide on this site, so no link — but a doom-and-sludge player reaching for a 300 ms analog slapback tells you something real about what this pedal does under high gain, which we will come back to in the tone recipes.
Tarek Jafar of The Blue Stones is documented via an Instagram post in which he is playing a riff while producer Paul Meany adjusts the knobs of the WM71 — Jafar’s own caption tags Way Huge and hashtags the pedal. Studio use, first-party, and about as clean a piece of evidence as social media produces. Neither Jafar nor Meany has a guide on this site.
Credited to the MkII or the original — related, but not the same pedal
The larger roster belongs to the big-box versions, and it is a genuinely impressive list. On the MkII (31 documented artists): Noel Gallagher, Troy Van Leeuwen of Queens of the Stone Age — who kept one in a rack drawer alongside a Way Huge Green Rhino, an EarthQuaker Devices Dispatch Master, a Fuzzrocious Demon and an MXR Q Zone, and whose bandmate Josh Homme has an original on the books — the late Taylor Hawkins, bassist Juan Alderete, and the Nameless Ghoul who played lead in Ghost between 2010 and 2016, who ran his alongside an MXR Carbon Copy specifically for slapback.
On the original (9 documented artists): Josh Homme, John Mayer and Brad Paisley — which is a fair summary of the pedal’s constituency, one desert-rock riff writer, one tone obsessive and one Telecaster player who needs slapback for a living.
And there is a lovely aside on Jeff Beck: his guitar tech, explaining why an Aqua-Puss was in the rig, said it was brought in for slapback because “the repeats are pretty accurate to the actual sound of the guitar.” That is a working professional’s compliment — not warmth, not vintage mojo, but fidelity of the first repeat, which is exactly what a 1% delay-distortion figure buys you.
None of these are MkIII credits. The circuits are closely related and the sound is the same family, but we are not going to present a Van Leeuwen rack photo as evidence for a pedal released eight years after it. What the MkIII’s own roster tells you is simpler and more useful: it is small, it is recent, and the three players documented on it are a blues guitarist, a sludge-metal guitarist and an indie-rock guitarist. That is a wide net for a pedal that does one thing.
Tone recipes: nine settings that actually work
1. Sun Records slapback
Delay 9:00 · Feedback 8:00 · Blend 9:30. The canonical setting and the reason the pedal exists. A single fast repeat, low enough in the mix that it reads as room rather than as effect. Put a Telecaster and a clean amp in front of it and you have every rockabilly record ever made.
2. Faux spring reverb
Delay 8:00 · Feedback 11:00 · Blend 9:00. Very short time, moderate repeats: the individual echoes smear into each other and the result reads as a small metallic room. Useful if your amp has no reverb, and dramatically less woolly than trying the same trick with a digital delay, because the BBD roll-off darkens each successive repeat the way a spring tank does.
3. Double-tracked rhythm
Delay 10:00 · Feedback 7:00 (minimum) · Blend 10:00. One repeat, close, at near-equal level. Strum a chord and it sounds like two guitarists slightly out of sync, which is the oldest thickening trick in record production. Works best on clean or edge-of-breakup tones; under high gain the two copies fight.
4. Country lead thickener
Delay 9:30 · Feedback 9:00 · Blend 9:00. Two or three repeats, tight, quiet. Chicken-picked lines get a tail that follows the phrasing without blurring it. This is what Brad Paisley’s Aqua-Puss is doing.
5. Surf
Delay 11:00 · Feedback 10:00 · Blend 10:30. Longer, wetter, more repeats — the setting that Equipboard reviewer described as “somewhere between Dick Dale and OhSees.” Add a trem and stand back.
6. Sludge slapback under high gain
Delay 8:30 · Feedback 8:30 · Blend 8:30. The Buzz Osborne use case. Under a big fuzz, a very short and very quiet repeat does not sound like delay at all — it sounds like the amp got bigger and the room got harder. Try it after a Swollen Pickle and listen to what it does to the low mids.
7. Dotted-eighth approximation
Delay 2:30 · Feedback 10:30 · Blend 10:00. The pedal’s outer limit as a rhythmic device, and it only works at faster tempos — at 300 ms a dotted eighth lands you at around 150 bpm. Beyond that you need a tap-tempo box; see the TC Electronic Flashback 2.
8. Pre-dirt boost and blur
Delay 10:00 · Feedback 9:30 · Blend 9:00, pedal placed BEFORE the overdrive. Owner discussion likens the Aqua-Puss in this position to a Belle Epoch — the repeats get driven along with the dry signal, which glues them together and makes the whole thing behave like one saturated instrument rather than a guitar plus an echo. Unorthodox, and one of the best things this pedal does.
9. Controlled self-destruction
Delay to taste · Feedback 3:00+ · Blend noon. Runaway oscillation. Because the delay time is short the pitch of the oscillation is high and it rises fast, and sweeping the Delay knob while it screams gives you the metallic pitch-warp that people buy this pedal for. Roll Feedback back to escape. Do not do this with the master volume up.
All positions given as clock face. Remember the Blend warning throughout — this pedal wants far less Blend than your instincts suggest.
How it compares
versus the Aqua-Puss MkII
Same circuit family, same MN3205 chip, same three controls, same range. The MkII is bigger, has the sky-blue bent-steel chassis and the funky original lettering, and is now discontinued and trading around $105 used. The MkIII is smaller and available new. If board space is not a constraint and you like the look, the MkII is the better value; if it is, the MkIII gives you the same job in about half the real estate.
versus the original Aqua-Puss (AP1/AP2)
Buy the MkIII. Equipboard currently lists an AP1 at $2,750. That is not a typo, and it is the entire reason the reissues exist. The MkIII is not going to be worth $2,750 in twenty-five years, and that is fine, because it costs $179.99 today.
versus the MXR Carbon Copy
The most common cross-shop, and they are not the same pedal. The Carbon Copy gives you 600 ms and a switchable modulation circuit; the Aqua-Puss gives you 300 ms and a self-oscillation that goes somewhere the Carbon Copy will not. The Carbon Copy is darker and more polite. The Aqua-Puss is brighter, janglier, and more willing to misbehave. If you want one analog delay for everything, the Carbon Copy. If you want a slapback specialist, this.
versus the Boss DM-2W
The DM-2W Waza Craft has a Standard mode at 300 ms and a Custom mode extending to 800 ms, plus an expression input. It is the most versatile of the three classic short analog delays and it is the one to buy if you want the option of longer times later. It is also less characterful at the extremes — Boss engineered out precisely the artefacts Tripps left in.
versus the Way Huge Supa-Puss
The Supa-Puss (WHE707) is the big brother: up to a full second of analog delay, tap tempo, modulation, and a considerably higher price. It sits at rank 45 in Equipboard’s delay category with 34 documented artists including John Mayer and Matt Pike. If the 300 ms ceiling is the thing stopping you buying an Aqua-Puss, the Supa-Puss is the answer within the same family. If the 300 ms ceiling is not bothering you, you do not need it.
versus a tape echo emulation
A Strymon El Capistan or a Boss RE-2 Space Echo will do a beautiful slapback, and will also do six other things, and will cost more and need more knobs turned. The Aqua-Puss has no menus, no presets and no secondary functions. That is either a feature or a dealbreaker and you probably already know which.
versus the Way Huge Echo Puss
The Alan Forbes-illustrated Echo Puss is the cheaper, simpler Way Huge delay, currently around $139 with 12 documented artists including Matt Bellamy. Owner discussion is fairly consistent that the Aqua-Puss MkIII is preferred over it for self-oscillation. If oscillation is not something you want, the difference narrows considerably.
Buying guide
Current pricing, September 2026. Dunlop’s MSRP is $179.99, and unusually the retail channel agrees with the manufacturer for once: Sweetwater, Guitar Center, Musician’s Friend and Amazon all list it at $179.99, Reverb has new units at $169.00, Thomann at $199.00, and Gear4Music in the UK at £167.50. Equipboard’s tracked average across four merchants is $168, placing it in the Standard/Professional tier.
Used is where the value is. Amazon shows like-new units at $159.99, and Reverb’s used floor is $90.00. At ninety dollars this is an easy recommendation. There is very little to go wrong on a three-knob analog delay with no digital section, and the relay bypass means the most failure-prone part of a vintage pedal — the mechanical true-bypass switch — is not carrying the signal.
Buy it if: you want slapback, doubling, faux-spring, or a tone-thickener you leave on; you are short of board space; you want an analog delay that will self-oscillate on command; you play rockabilly, country, surf, garage, or heavy music that benefits from a short tight repeat.
Do not buy it if: you need long ambient washes, dotted-eighth work at slow tempos, tap tempo, presets, or stereo. All four of the reviews aggregated on Equipboard name the delay-time ceiling as the pedal’s one real limitation, and one owner is blunt that it is “useless for shoegaze stuff or David Gilmour-kind of trippy stuff.” For that end of the map, look at the EHX Deluxe Memory Man or a modern multi-delay like the Source Audio Nemesis. And if it is Gilmour you are chasing specifically, that is a long-delay problem, not a short-delay one.
The one ergonomic gripe worth knowing before you buy: the aggregated review consensus flags switch placement — on a Smalls-format enclosure the footswitch is close to the knobs, and it is possible to nudge a setting with your foot. It is a real complaint on every miniature pedal with top-facing controls, and the mitigation is the same as always: set it and leave it, which is how most people use this pedal anyway.
Ownership notes
Power. 16 mA at 9 V DC, which is about as undemanding as a pedal gets — a Mini Iso-Brick will run this and several friends. The connector is 5.5 mm × 2.1 mm with positive voltage on the outer sleeve, which is standard centre-negative and the same as the rest of the Dunlop/MXR/Way Huge line, including the Green Rhino MkV. Note the contrast with the centre-positive 5.5/2.5 mm connectors on Eventide’s Factor units — if you run a mixed board, label your cables.
Battery. Yes, there is a battery option, which is rare on a pedal this small. Two behaviours worth knowing: plugging in an external supply disconnects the battery, and unplugging the input jack is what shuts the circuit off, so pull your cable when you are done or you will find a flat battery. The pedal locks into bypass when the battery is dying rather than degrading into weirdness — a genuinely thoughtful design choice that means you find out at soundcheck instead of mid-set.
Protection. Dunlop specifies power-protection circuitry against AC supplies. Do not use this as an excuse to plug an AC wall wart into it, but it will not immediately die if a stagehand does.
Placement. Conventionally after the dirt, before modulation and reverb. But see tone recipe 8 — the pre-dirt position is genuinely worth trying on this specific pedal and is a documented owner favourite.
The clock whine. If you hear a faint high-pitched tone over the repeats at long delay settings, the pedal is not broken. It is doing what Tripps designed it to do. Roll the Delay knob back and it goes away.
Frequently asked questions
Is the Aqua-Puss MkIII the same circuit as the MkII?
Functionally yes. Both use the MN3205 bucket-brigade chip, both have the same three controls, and both cover 20–300 ms. The MkIII’s headline change is the enclosure: a Way Huge Smalls box rather than the full-size bent-steel chassis, plus a relay-based true-bypass switch rather than a mechanical one.
Why is the maximum delay time only 300 ms?
Because that is what the original 1990s pedal did, and the reissues are faithful to it. The MN3205 delay line has a finite number of capacitor stages, and 300 ms is what you get before the sound quality degrades past the point of usefulness. Jeorge Tripps himself questioned whether anyone would want a 300 ms analog delay in 2009; the market answered him.
Does it really self-oscillate?
Yes, and Dunlop’s own manual warns you about it. Above roughly 3 o’clock on the Feedback control the repeats stop decaying and start building. Because the delay time is short, the resulting oscillation is high-pitched and metallic rather than a slow rumble, and sweeping the Delay control while it is oscillating produces a dramatic pitch warp. It is one of the pedal’s signature moves.
How loud should I set the Blend knob?
Lower than you think. Experienced owners consistently report that between 9 and 10 o’clock covers virtually every musical use, with 8:30 giving a subtle-but-present effect. Past 10 o’clock you are into deliberately washed-out territory. If your first impression of this pedal was “too much,” check the Blend.
Can I use it for U2-style dotted-eighth delay?
At faster tempos only. A dotted eighth at 300 ms corresponds to roughly 150 bpm, so anything slower than that is out of range. It is also not the pedal’s natural habitat — no tap tempo, and the repeats darken quickly. For rhythmic delay work, a digital or hybrid unit will serve you better.
Is the high-pitched whine at long settings a fault?
No. It is bucket-brigade clock noise, and Jeorge Tripps confirmed to Premier Guitar in 2010 that it was deliberately left in to match the behaviour of period analog delays such as the Ibanez AD-9, in the same way tape echoes have a slight warble. If it bothers you, use shorter delay times.
Which artists actually use the MkIII?
Three are documented: Christone “Kingfish” Ingram, who discusses the pedal by name on video; Buzz Osborne of the Melvins, credited on a photo with the qualifier “sometimes”; and Tarek Jafar of The Blue Stones, from an Instagram post in the studio with producer Paul Meany. The much larger roster you will see attached to the Aqua-Puss name — Noel Gallagher, Troy Van Leeuwen, Taylor Hawkins, Josh Homme, John Mayer, Brad Paisley — belongs to the MkII or the 1990s original, not to the WM71.
Should I buy the MkIII or hunt down an original?
Buy the MkIII. Original Aqua-Puss units trade at prices that reach into four figures — Equipboard currently shows an AP1 at $2,750 — because Way Huge built them in tiny numbers before closing in 1999. The reissues exist precisely so that ordinary players do not have to pay collector prices for a slapback delay. The MkIII is $169–$179.99 new and from $90 used, and it makes the same noise.
Is 16 mA and a battery compartment unusual for a mini pedal?
The current draw is not — analog delays are frugal. The battery compartment is: most miniature-format pedals drop battery capability entirely to save internal volume. Way Huge kept it on both the Aqua-Puss MkIII and the Green Rhino MkV, which is a small mercy for anyone playing a gig where the power supply has gone missing.