It is quite simply the best guitar effect I have ever heard.
I've been tweaking away with all the different tape machines and settings and there honestly isn't a bad sound in it.
Lately I've been working on a cover of "Little Red Riding Hood" (I know, pretty metal right, I picked it up as a practice tune because it uses loads of open chords) using my crunch channel and the el Cap and it immediately became evident that as amazing as this pedal sounds with a clean amp, it sounds very, very good in the loop of a crunchy amp too.
One of the best things though is that I could almost immediately emulate the quite distinctive sound this pedal produces in the YouTube clips that inspired me to buy it. Now the same can be said for my MicroPOG too, but the POG effect is more like an exotic spice to be used sparingly, whereas whenever I turn the El Cap off, I find myself thinking "Actually, lets just try something else" and turn it back on.
I LOVE that just by turning the repeats control I can go from almost reverb-like delay to a massive background "wash" of sounds that you can play over and sculpt in real time. I also LOVE the way the controls emulated their analog counterparts. It's so cool to hear the tape speed up or slow down as you turn the delay time knob, it sounds so authentic it's ridiculous.
The only negative points include the one I mentioned initially whereby you have to hold down both buttons to access secondary functions, and the lack of indication as to where the secondary controls are positioned. (Strymon do however provide a nice blank setup template chart you can use to record your own settings as well as a page of suggested settings)
After a little fiddling I've also found that although Strymon say you can map any control to the expression pedal, I've found what they mean is "you can map any PRIMARY control to the expression pedal".
I have a little "pot in a box" that I use in place of the expression pedal for my Boomerang (I use it to control overall loop volume, very cool) and I thought it would be cool to make another one and use it control the reverb or boost secondary functions of the El Cap, but alas, you cannot.
They are very minor negatives though and are absolutely overshadowed by the awesome sounds this thing creates.
Sure it's expensive at $399, but compared to some of the boutique overdrives out there costing similar amounts, the El Cap is massively better value. I mean c'mon, I built a copy of a King of Tone for well under $100 (Vs $235 asking price) in an afternoon. The El Cap has a 266MHz CPU and all kinds of zany programming going on. There's no way I could make something like that.
Reply With Quote
Originally Posted by Ch0jin
