NPD - Strymon El Capistan

[Eric***]

That seems to be a well-regarded pedal, so congrats.

Can you help me understand what the current craze is over tape echo? What's an example of that used in a song I might recognize? I can kind of understand the idea of digital versus analog delay, in that digital is so exact and tends to sound 'sharper,' right? So analog makes it a little more subtle. But I'm not quite sure I get the whole tape-echo thing. What does it do for you in a musical sense?

Not trying to pick a fight or anything -- just curious.

[Ch0jin]

....Not trying to pick a fight or anything -- just curious.

Hey Eric, Nothing confrontational about your post at all, so no worries about that.

I can explain why I wanted a tape style echo really easily. I've had kind of a growing interest in ambient/drone style sounds from some of the YouTube guys I follow, and when the El Cap was released a year or more ago, it quickly replaced or was added to pedal boards that had Deluxe MM's and Line 6 delays on them. I headed over to the Strymon site and watched all the El Cap demo's and discovered right away that it helped to create the kind of "Lo-Fi" delay sound I had in my head, and was trying to get from my AD80 Delay.

The Tape "sound" is everything from a slightly warmer (less high frequency response) version of what you get from any type of delay, through to a mangled, glitchy, AM radio sound. For me specifically, the whole ambient/drone thing is about creating layers of audio texture as a complex background and dropping in minimalist accents over the top using guitar, bass or samples. What I like about this pedal is I can tweak my background sounds to roll off high frequency response (and low frequency if I like) so that the background remains a background, and my accents sit nicely on top. I can even loop a phrase with one type of delay (say the echoplex model) then switch to another (like the more complex multi-head mode) and the notes I play over the top don't sound like they are coming from the exact same delay.

Furthermore, as the background sound is a huge part of the ambient/drone sound, using the El Cap enables me to add things like random wow and flutter, tape crinkle and aged tape effects to that background "wash" to make it a little more interesting sonically.

Lastly, I already have a really nice sounding delay in the AD80 kit from General Guitar Gadgets. It's kind of a hybrid beast, wrapping the analog circuit of the Ibanez AD80 around the PT2399 echo chip. It's digital enough to do super crisp, but analog enough to sound 'warm' and get a little glitchy with long delays (well I say long, but I'm still talking less than a second with the PT80) Pairing that one with the El Cap seemed like it would cover all delay sounds for me.

Where would you hear real tape? That I'm not sure of, but I'm pretty sure Pink Floyd used tape based delay and stuff on Dark Side. Then again, prior to the invention of the bucket brigade IC, everyone who wanted delay used tape.

I don't know if that really answers your question (as I've been typing bits and pieces between jobs) but at least it should give you an idea why I wanted one