Catalinbread Belle Epoch

EdGrip · February 2014

I bought one of these last year, but what with working away and having an amp out of action, I just lent it to a friend when it arrived.

He, in turn, didn't do anything with it because he was building a log cabin/jam room.

The other day, we decided to plug it in and see what it did.

"But what amp did you use to test it?" I hear you croak. Well, I'll tell you. It was one of these:

It was tremendous fun. It works as a straight up delay pedal. It does rockabilly slapback, blah blah blah yawn. But what was more fun was one of us playing stuff while the other just messed about with knobs - as you probably know already, all of the functions of an Echoplex tape echo are modelled. When you increase the delay time, what you're doing is slowing down the running of the tape. So your previous delays get correspondingly lower in pitch. And vice versa. You can up the record level so that the tape head saturates the tape. You can increase the feedback so that the delays become infinite, though because they're on a tape they eventually degrade into nasty transistor radio narrow-band snide parodies of what you played. There's a mod knob, so that you can add in the warble and random pitch fluctuations of a tape echo in need of some TLC. Or a lot of TLC, up to you.

Well, we thought, OBVIOUSLY, what we need to do is plug a microphone in to this and put it through the monitors. And so we did, and it was good. One of us talked weird while the other twiddled knobs. REALLY FUN. Lots of possibility here for non-guitar sources into this pedal.

I will let you know any further thoughts when we eventually get round to trying it with a real amp.

- Ed