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Electro-Harmonix Pico Rerun Review

EHX Rerun

Dark, enveloping, and mysterious tape-echo-style repeats on the cheap in an enclosure that fits in the smallest spaces.

Dark, enveloping repeats that rival more expensive tape-echo emulations and offer an alternative to click-prone BBD echoes. Cool chorus and flanger effects at fastest repeat times.

Small knobs make it tough to take advantage of real-time tweaking.

$137

Electro-Harmonix Pico Rerun
ehx.com

4
4.5
4
5

My most treasured effect is an old Echoplex. Nothing feels like it, and though I’ve tried many top-flight digital emulations, most of which sounded fantastic, nothing sounds quite like it either. If the best digital “tape” delays do one thing well, it’s approximating the darkness and unpredictable variations in tape-echo repeats.


Electro-Harmonix’s Pico Rerun plays the character of tape echo very convincingly in this respect. It hangs with more expensive digital tape echoes at a $137 price tag that’s easy to stomach. Better still, this Pico version is petite and offers unexpected surprises and flexibility.

Beyond the Pico Rerun’s essential enveloping voice, the pedal enables a lot of fairly authentic tape-echo functionality. Manipulating the feedback, blend, and echo rate controls together (which is tricky given their small size) yields flying-saucer liftoff and “Dazed and Confused” time/space-mangling textures in copious measure. These tweaks betray some digital artifacts—mainly trebly peaks that don’t have the benefit of real tape-compression softening, but they hardly get in the way of the fun. Saturation lends welcome drive and haze. And the flutter button adds faux tape wobble in three degrees of intensity. At the most intense setting, long repeats take on a woozy sense of drift. At the fastest rates, however, the flutter function will generate chorus and flange effects that neither my Echoplex, nor my best tape echo simulators, can manufacture.

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