Jam Pedals Delay Llama Supreme NAMM Custom Shop (USED, 2019)

A one-off NAMM Custom Shop Delay Llama Supreme, hand-painted in a psychedelic Monterey motif, with a fully analog tape-echo circuit underneath.

JAM has been hand-painting pedals in Greece since the beginning, which means no two are quite alike even off the standard line. The Custom Shop pieces they build for NAMM are a different tier again: one-off artwork, done by hand, usually never repeated. This one wears a faithful take on the psychedelic motif from the most famous Stratocaster ever set on fire, the one painted the night before Monterey in 1967. Swirls, florals, the whole thing. It is, without much competition, the most striking pedal we've had on the wall this year.

The good news is that the circuit underneath deserves the paint.

The Delay Llama line was built to chase tape echo, and the Supreme is the version where JAM stopped restraining themselves. The signal path is fully analog, running BBD chips modeled on the Panasonic MN3205, so the repeats degrade the way they should: each one a little darker, a little softer at the edges, until they dissolve instead of just stopping. You get up to 600ms, which is more room than the classic bucket brigade units ever gave you.

What separates the Supreme from a simple analog delay is everything built around that core. Tap tempo with three subdivisions, quarter, eighth, and dotted eighth, selectable by toggle, which solves the genuinely hard problem of tapping one rhythm while playing another. A footswitchable modulation section built on JAM's WaterFall chorus circuit, with its own depth and speed controls, for repeats that drift and warble like a machine that's been on the road a while. A filter with a Q control that sits at the tone knob's cutoff, which can put a subtle edge on the repeats or, wound up with modulation running, take the whole thing somewhere much less polite.

The hold function is the one people play with longest. Keep the tap switch down and the repeats run away into infinite oscillation. Let go and the pedal drops straight back to wherever the repeats knob was set. No cleanup, no runaway you have to chase down.

Expression inputs for delay time and delay level mean you can put both under your foot, and there's an internal trimmer to set the maximum repeat count to taste.

This is a used pedal, so it's here at a used price, and the artwork is not something JAM will build again. If the paint is what drew you in, the circuit is what keeps it on the board.