I’ve been talking about it for a long time now, but the opportunity to grab myself the highly coveted Strymon El Capistan delay, or should I say “dTape Echo” finally presented itself on Friday and I was so quick to hand over my card details I didn’t realise until I’d already been mailed an invoice that I didn’t even bother to ask for current price! Yeah I was that excited.

Fast forward to yesterday and a neat little package arrived to the office, I know many of you have had the pain of eyeballing a new piece of gear across the work desk all day counting the minutes until you can get it home, so I’m sure you can imagine how focussed I was at work as knock off time approached.

So anyway, let’s start with first impressions because that seems like a vaguely logical place to start.
The first thing I noticed is that it’s quite a bit smaller than I expected. I’ve watched just about every YouTube clip of this pedal and yet still I was pleasantly surprised by how compact it is. It’s only a little bigger than a 1590BB (for you pedal builders) in width and length although it is a fait bit taller. Pretty impressive considering what’s inside, but I’ll get to that.

There is no user manual included, Strymon instead going for a postcard style ‘quick start guide’ and making the full manual available online. This works just fine as the pedal feels quite intuitive, however after enjoying the light-hearted tongue in cheek manual that came with my Boomerang III a little while back, Strymon could have used a printed manual as another way to showcase the personality of the brand. There is a Strymon sticker though! Also of note is the omission of a power supply for the Australian version. No issue for me as I have a custom power supply feeding my board anyway, but worth mentioning. There is also no provision for battery, likely due to power requirements, however my current delay (the amazing sounding GGG PT80 which is staying!) will suck a 9V dry in minutes anyway so again, not a big deal.

“Yeah that’s all great, but plug the thing in!” I hear you scream.

Right then, this is where it gets amazing.

I dropped it in the spot where my PT80 lives, as second last pedal in my FX loop and just started messing about with the controls. Within minutes I had a pretty close approximation of the massive waves of ambient echo that feature heavily on most youtube clips. Simply amazing. Tweaking the wow and flutter and tape age knobs results in the tastiest hints of modulation and warms up the repeats like nothing else I’ve heard. I’ve got two quick clips coming up, but first a little sidetrack to talk about what this pedal is actually all about for those of you who haven’t been obsessing over it for the past year like I have.

Let me start with a massive statement. I have never heard a tape echo in real life, but the El Capistan sounds exactly, in fact let me caps that, EXACTLY, like what I think a real tape echo should sound like.

Why is that relevant? Well because I’m not looking for “Authentic” because I don’t know what “Authentic” sounds like, other than youtube clips of old echoplex units and the like. To me, having a pedal (or a guitar or amp) sound exactly like the sound you had in your head is the biggest win of all. Full points to Strymon in this regard.

So you might have worked out by now that the El Capistan is a DSP based emulation of vintage tape echo’s. Yes, plural because there’s not just one tape echo in the box, there are three. A fixed head type, a single head type and a multi head type. All behave and sound different, from quick sharp slap back to super slow warbles. But wait, there’s more! In a move that can only be described as “complete awesomeness” there is also a sound on sound style tape looper! Considering I already have a Boss RC-2, a Boomerang III and a lo-fi loophole, I really didn’t need another looper, but being able to make little loops full of wow and flutter and tape crinkle is certainly a concept I am completely down with. As if that wasn’t enough, there’s also a built in spring reverb. Emulated of course, but these guys also make the incredible BlueSky reverb pedal, so not surprisingly, it sounds fantastic!

So to review so far, we have three distinctly different tape echo machines, a tape looper, and a spring reverb, all in this little box. That would be awesome by itself, but they guys at Strymon have gone above and beyond with the modelling of analogue mechanical effects to the point that even the switches and knobs on the pedal behave like I imagine their electromechanical ancestors would behave. I wasn’t prepared for that and it really impressed me! For example, on the single head machine you can switch the tape speed from “Normal” to “Double”, which in a real tape echo would, I believe, give you shorter, cleaner repeats. Now in a real machine with the inertia of moving parts, flicking that switch would cause everything to gradually speed up over a second or so, and much to my amazement, that’s what happens with the pedal too! Earlier on I said I thought the El Capistan sounded like what I imagined real tape echo machines sound like, well the controls also completely capture what I imagine to be the feel of an old tape machine (or in fact, three of them).

So I’m loving the sounds and the feel of the pedal, what else? Well I also really appreciate the little “extras” it comes with. It’s like the engineers stalked every “I want to build the ultimate delay pedal” thread on pedal builder forums and just built in all the wish list items. For example, hold down the tap temp switch and you get infinite repeats. You can switch between true bypass and “tails” mode (where the repeats fade out naturally when you disengage the pedal), there’s even a +/- 3dB boost/cut control. Want to control repeats with an expression pedal? No worries. You can configure the El Capistan to adjust any control with an external expression pedal. Need to switch between two delay sounds? Grab the favourite switch instead of the expression pedal and you have 2 El Cap’s in one!

Negatives, there have to be some right? Well the fact that you can use an expression pedal OR a favourite switch could be annoying (I don’t have either right now so not really a big deal) and the fact that there is only one preset is a bit of a limitation, however, I look at the lack of multiple presets the same way I approach my Boomerang III’s lack of loop storage. It forces me to be creative every time, rather than just using the same delay settings (or loops) over and over. The only thing that I actually found a little less than awesome last night was the way you have to hold down both footswitches to access the secondary functions (Reverb, Boost/Cut, Tape crinkle, head bias, low end contour). It’s tricky to hold on to a guitar, press both buttons and turn a dial. There is also no real way of knowing where the secondary function buttons are positioned (How much reverb have I dialled in for example?). I don’t have the easy answer, some have suggested concentric pots would have worked better, but I really like the knobs and the smooth feel of the pots they have used. What I’ll likely do is knock up a little box with a pot in it and use that in place of an expression pedal to control (perhaps) reverb. I did the same thing with my Boomerang III to control overall loop volume and it’s worth its weight in, well plastic.

So my overall impression after a few hours of messing with it is “Awesome”. It is probably the most impressive pedal I’ve built or bought. They aren’t cheap at $399AUD, but they are a LOT cheaper and more practical than even one vintage tape echo. Dangerously I’m now eyeing off other Strymon effects!

So anyway, two very basic little audio samples from my phone. I intended to record something decent, but I ended up just jamming away for ages playing with settings. I’ll likely do more recording with this (I’m thinking spooky soundscapes over old public domain films) but that’s for later.

For now we have a few minutes of me turning knobs and strumming random chords in clip one. It's a little soft at first as I'm basically just turning knobs and listening to the wiggly bits. Then I bust out a couple of chords in no particular order and just let them ring so you can hear all the little details in the repeats. Amp on crunch channel and pedal is in the FX loop.

Clip One

Clip two is loads cleaner. Neck pickup into SHO (for some sparkles) then into clean amp. I couldn't really concentrate on my playing because I was too busy drooling over the sounds so apologies in advance for the random noodling.

Clip Two

So there you have it. If you would like to have a desk full of vintage tape echo machines in your rig, without paying vintage prices, without the maintenance hassles and without the lack of portability, you should be looking at the Strymon El Capistan.