MEMORY EQUIPPED effects boards have been around in a restrained form for a couple of years. Roland's MCC 700 is a good example. Big, it was; could park a Cortina in it. It could turn on any or all of its connected effects units at the press of one footswitch and recall the pecking order for their connection — sustain to distortion to chorus or chorus to distortion to sustain.

But, the Roland and devices akin couldn't memorise the settings on the pedals themselves — how much fuzz, how deep a flange, and so on. This the Europa can do.

The DP 400 C has four effects — compressor, distortion, chorus and delay — built into a mains powered board, that squats solidly on the floor, 2in high at the back, 1in at the front. No, you can't take the pedals out and replace them with your own. They might look removable and self contained, but that's a trick of the tracer who sketched out the front panel.

A row of eight rubberised footswitches run across the front (light enough to be activated by hand should you want the Europa by your side). These correspond to the DP 400 C's eight memories. The alternative DP 400 F also has eight, but with a flanger in place of the chorus, and the DP 600 C (£420) has an additional noise gate and 16 memory locations.

There are sustain/level and distortion/level controls for compressor and fuzz; speed/depth for the stereo chorus and time/feedback/level for the analogue delay. Outputs and input are ranged down the right hand edge with an on/off switch at the back.

I programme, you programme, we programme with the aid of five other buttons, one beneath a red LED readout and the remainder parcelled out among the effects. Press (with foot) the write button and the figure in the LED display (indicating the memory location) will flash. Turn on the desired effects, adjust their levels, speeds, times etc, and when finished, tap one of those eight switches at the front. Is done. Now each time you tap that switch again, the Europa will leap back to this mix of effects.

So as well as making instant selections of the boxes you want, you can flip from, say, a high speed chorus and a slapback echo, to a slow chorus and a long echo. Apart from being invaluable in moments of haste, it must encourage you to get more out of your effects on days when you'd usually be tempted to leave the controls set for the whole gig.

The disadvantage, he says, to the echo of previous reviews, is that you're stuck with the French Europa company's idea of a 'good' pedal. Uncompromising lot, they don't even include a send and return loop to involve your own, unprogrammable units. And, to be honest, this is an average set of pedals at a more than average price (though obviously the programming electronics take up some of the fiscal slack).

The compressor keeps a tight ceiling on overloud passages and stretches out the decay of your guitar notes, but it doesn't accentuate the attack of your sound as some compressors will do. More of a sustainer, really.

Less of a quandary over the distortion. It's transistorised, it's fierce, it's fuzzy, it's loud and not much else. The chorus passes muster, though with little in reserve to offer the alternative of vibrato. The delay? Hmm... a few Gallic miscalculations here, methinks.

The maximum delay time is 300ms. Which is acceptable, once you adjust to the time control working backwards (shortest times to the far right). Reviewer be less charitably inclined towards the feedback control's habit of going way over the top and emitting all sorts of screaming electrical protests. And when four effects are designed to cohabit in one box, there's scant excuse for mismatching among them. And yet, positioning the output levels of the compressor or distortion anywhere near full will invariably overload the delay so the repeats leave the machine with a dirty burp.

Another strange side effect is that when you swap between programmes with widely varying delay times, the footswitch may be noiseless, but the echo will try to 'dump' the last burst of music you played. This will be repeated either as a low murmur (short times changing to long) or as a fast, high pitched chatter (vice versa). The delay is trying to unload what it just recorded in order to adapt to the delay time of the new programme. Odd, but not enough to put you off.

Europa's programming is not infinitely versatile. Though you cannot feel any clicks on the control knobs, they're actually choosing from a number of preset values. Without these predetermined limits the memory department would have to be far larger and consequently exhorbitantly expensive. Vital levels such as distortion amount and delay time have 16 divisions; the rest eight or four. It's enough.

In terms of noise and treble loss, the Europa fights cleanly. It's the compressor and distortion that are the buzzy misbehavers while the chorus and delay keep quiet.

But disregarding the bonus points of self-contained neatness, tough box and mains power, have the French got a winner? The memories are an unqualified success and programming is certain to accelerate in importance among effects. But the pedals themselves are nothing special no matter how well they remember what you tell them.

DP 400C programmable FX: £375

CONTACT: Capelle, (Contact Details).