Tape Does Something Pedals Can't

let's talk about tape delay not the tape delay setting on your digital delay pedal but actual physical tape delay with real tape now tape delay or tape Echo is insanely expensive it's really heavy and bulky and a pain in the butt to bring to gigs and it requires a lot of Maintenance yet some people claim that it is the most important effect in their signal chain and absolutely swear by it and there's a really good reason for that entropy a Sound Source experiencing real physical entropy makes a big difference whether it's a very simple or complex usage Tapco became a commercially available thing in the late 1950s with the Watkins copycat and the tone it created is actually intertwined with the origins of electric guitar and Rock music The Ventures were the first band to popularize the tape Echo sound in their debut album Lo don't run and it kind of kicked off the surf Rock genre and everything after that that but this little history lesson gets really juicy in 1974 when Roland releases the re201 space echo which might be recognizable to you as it's a very famous piece of gear and that's because it added spring reverb a ton of different delay modes but most importantly it did crazy things like looping and even self oscillating with feedback when I was about 10 years old for some reason I got my hands on a VHS tape of Joanie Mitchell's Shadows and Light tour and I feel like I have to emphasize this in the 1980s if you got your hands on a VHS tape you generally watched it or at the very least fast forwarded through it to see what was on it because in the 1980s you were super bored all the time but had I not watched it then I never would have been able to see Jack op Pistorius improvise a tape Loop and then solo over it which just blew my mind and still inspires me even to this day as a 87-year-old man now I have had the distinguished honor of owning two different Rand space Echo units in my lifetime and the first one was gifted to me as a unit that didn't work that I unsurprisingly was unable to repair and the second one I spent a ton of money on it had some really old tape in it it got me through part of this album before breaking down and I really miss it now all of these older tape machines from the 1970s are pretty much notorious for being high maintenance and constantly breaking down so much so that an entire company was created and sustained in Australia that did nothing but repairing them and refurbishing and reselling them and that company's name is Echo fix fortunately for me the Mastery gained from repairing all of these units allowed Echo fix to create modernized far more reliable tape delay units that have that space Echo aesthetic now this isn't tape looping by the way I mean it is you could just turn the feedback knob up and have a short Loop but if you're you're a looping artist who's used to these Advanced looping pedals this is not going to do much for you so rather than creating a musically intentful Loop tape Echo is much more about creating and stacking textures and with the advanced routing options you can get really creative with it so back here we have balanced ins and outs then individual outputs for all of the four tape heads then an output for the chorus and Reverb and then a direct out this gives you an excellent sounding way to turn a mono signal into a stereo or a much more spacious one for example Jamie liell routed all four heads to different speakers to create a crazy quad surround setup if you are a big Reverb snob like I am then this probably gets you excited because you'll immediately start thinking what kind of room imp pulses this could create or let's say maybe you're a little bit more practical and just want your guitar practice to sound phenomenal and have unlimited amounts of money you can take two of these tape head heads and Route them to a miked guitar ramp and then two more can go to different effects or even a direct input let's stop talking about this stuff and do it already so this is a complete and utter disastrous looking mess that is actually nothing compared to the mess that I had in my living room when the echo fix first arrived and I just set it up on the floor and went mad from there believe it or not as disorganized as this is this is kind of how I like it it brings me back to when I was a teenag just experimenting I'd have synths and petals set up on my bed pretty much anything that I could find I'd plug in to a giant old mixer like this and this mixer is just an analog Mackie 1402 it's nothing too fancy it's always just been my default when touring mostly just cuz I really understand all the ins and outs and switches and stuff some of the faders and pots are a little bit scratchy but that just kind of comes with the territory we also have our specular Tempest to give me some room Reverb we have have an empress ecosystem which is actually a dual echosystem but we're only going to use one might use the Looper I'll show you why it's not routed directly with my guitar in anyway and then of course we have the echo fix the E fx3 over here in all of its Glory so all these channels have access to these two auxiliary channels auxiliary channels is a better word for another place you could send your audio feed and so auxiliary 1 is going into the empress ecosystem and then auxiliary 2 is going into the echo fix the main output of the echo fix is going into Channel One the four tape heads are going into Channel 1 2 3 and four individually now the important part that's tying this whole thing together is the ecosystem is outputting back into the rear input of the echo fix it's worth noting that the echo fix also has chorus and Reverb out which are both mono which we could route somewhere else but I'm not going to do that right now because this is already way too nuts okay so 100% dry guitar signal now I'm going to send it out to the echo fix now the tape is not running but it does have Reverb and [Music] [Music] chorus all right let's get the tape going okay so I'm muting all of the individual tape heads and this is only the mono output from the front of the unit [Music] here all right let's turn on all of the individual heads which are panned strategically I suppose now we'll turn that speed down and get a bit of a longer [Applause] delay give it a little bit of chorus and then I'm going to turn down the low end on two of the tape heads [Laughter] here that is beautiful [Music] all right let's start feeding these two high-end only heads back into the tape machine control room out into Echo [Music] cancel [Music] go to Echo mode number one and this should be a little bit simpler of a delay [Music] pattern [Music] so I'm going to tap into the delay an estimate of double the time of this delay so the reason I've wired up this delay is to create a sort of feedback loop and that allows us to hear and I guess experience the sound of entropy which I I really really love and to me that's what makes this worth not only the price but the high level of Maintenance that you have to put into a mechanical device like this now tape due to its physicalness is a lot more forgiving than a tape Echo pedal or something like that and when you play a note that's too loud or when you have something like feedback it creates compression and a nice bit of overdrive and it actually is why people like tape so much but I think that entropy is really the magical thing about it and so what we'll be able to hear is the sound being written to this tape and then slowly fading away into chaos with time just like all of us will now here's a word from today's video sponsor entropy entropy is the inevitable journey to disorder less epically or philosophically it is the second law of Thermodynamics and it basically means that A System's thermal energy will be less and less available to be converted into mechanical work so let's just say that we had a very simple tape Loop machine and it was powered by geothermal energy so it would never really run out of power in our lifetimes eventually the tape is going to degs or one of the screws is going to find its way out and the roller is going to fall off and something's going to go wrong and it's not going to sound the same as when we recorded it as time goes on after that tape Loop machine stops working it will eventually Decay and be nothing and the atoms will just disperse into chaos entropy is an inescapable path that you and I and everything around us is on even this digital DSP board I could make a tape loop on this and eventually it would stop working it just wouldn't sound nearly as [Music] fantastic [Music] adding another delay in the chain even with the feedback turned all the way down allows us to get way more complex in fact I think that with these particular mixer settings every note that I play should grow in Taps and get more and more complex each time it passes through so let's hear that now there should be two at the end now there should be three yeah [Music] [Music] [Music] e you could play these like an instrument all on their own you don't even need a guitar or anything I've created a swamp all right no Reverb let's try and create Reverb through [Laughter] [Music] entropy [Music] [Laughter] [Music] [Laughter] all right well let's put this cover back on very carefully and take the echo fix into the other room and connect all of the ins and outs to something on my modular and create an ambient album okay so I recorded this whole bit a few days ago and things got really crazy really fast I was initially going to try and tell you everything that was going on in a voice over and that is just utterly futile I feel like it would be a 7-hour long video that would not make sense to anybody including [Music] [Music] myself [Music] [Applause] [Music] this has absolutely nothing to do with Reverb but there's this little trick you could do with the key step that helps you find a Melody if you're just not particularly inspired for one and if you just like program in major and minor chords maybe with like a little funky base behind it so let's just go with C minor to [Music] [Applause] start then major now it will play back our recorded chord sequence but whatever key we press it will just pitch it to that and so you could come up with weird things [Music] [Music] like [Music] basically what's happening is the chorus Echo the the tape Echo is sending a signal to the cosmos and then the cosmos is sending some of that to the output to the channels and then some of that going back into the tape delay and this is sort of regenerating it and then that's regenerating it but every single time that it goes through the tape delay it's going to degrade a little bit and so we're just creating this fractal of Decay until hopefully we just have noise I don't know how long that's going to take though but I'm willing to [Music] wait [Music] [Music] [Music] if you want a 50-minute version of that song to chill out to you can get it on my patreon I you know what I'm also going to upload it to band camp for $1,000 okay so takeaways here the echo fix is obviously an absolute Beast it has exceeded my expectations in every way I was actually a little bit worried that a new tape delay unit would be too clean but I now realized that through some creative routing you could get around that and make it sound dirty as but we also have to give credit where it's du The stman Sound Lab is a new module that I acquired and it is just immediately one of those modules where I'm like God damn it this is going to be in every single patch that I make for the next 2 years because it sounds magical I liked it so much that after the first day of using it it I impulse ordered this so I could have a pedal version with a similar algorithm in it and that will be used in a future Reverb Roundup video next up is the Som Labs Cosmos drifting memory station which I am just utterly annoyed with myself for not trying it out or picking one up sooner I've not even diven that or Dove that dived I've not even swam with my arms like this at an increased speed underwater into it that much or even used all of the modes and I already completely blown away I guess why I've been crawling around caves and bitching about Spotify Reverb has come a very long way so the cosmos will make an appearance on this channel in the near future as well all three of these aformentioned things are somewhat Boutique products and at the time of recording I have confirmed with perfect circuit that they have them all in stock Star Lab comes in at $649 whereas the cosmos comes in at $649 the echo fix EFX 3 is a lot more than $649 if you're interested in buying any of these things you could go to only benz.com seriously which is a work in progress of affiliate links related to things that you see on this channel and maybe you're like Ben I don't want any of this music gear crap but I really like your channel and want to be part of an amazing community and you know where this is going you can join my patreon and get all of this for as little as $1 all right let's wrap this up hopefully this video was inspiring for someone I had an absolute blast making it thank you for watching keep creating bye

Channel: Benn Jordan

Views: 66,343

Keywords: music production, science, synthesizers, pro audio, tape, tape echo, echo fix, re-201, space echo, tape delay, analog, tape vs digital, analog sound, tape sound, echo pedal, delay pedal, chorus echo, guitar fx, guitar effects, effects, fx, guitar pedals, ex-x3, echo fix ef-x3, roland, tapes, reel to reel, vintage, entropy, starlab, cosmos, soma labs, strymon, jaco pastorius, tape loop, loops, loop, tape dub, dubs, loop tape, diy, guitar, jazz, experimental, modular, modular synth, eurorack, syn

Id: KgZtCqzZlBo

Length: 21min 47sec (1307 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 29 2023