Featuring authentic tape behavior controls and full MIDI implementation, the EC-1 is a premium addition to any guitarist's setup.
Strymon Engineering, the Los Angeles-based company behind premium products for the guitar, plugin, and Eurorack markets, announced a new single-head tape echo pedal in their newer small format today, called the EC-1. Initially based around the award-winning dTape algorithm that helped to make the El Capistan pedal an industry titan, development took a different turn when Strymon acquired an immaculate and heavily modified tube Echoplex® EP-2. The new true stereo pedal features two models of the EP-2’s tube preamp with variable gain, as well as a three-position Record Level switch that allows for additional gain control. Glitchless tap tempo allows tapping in new tempos without tape artifacts, and the Tape Age and Mechanics controls modify a large number of parameters under the hood to deliver authentic tape behavior at any setting. Other features include TRS stereo Ins and Outs, full MIDI implementation, TRS MIDI, arear-panel audio routing switch, USB-C and 300 presets. Being true stereo, the EC-1 processes the left and right inputs independently, allowing it to be placed anywhere in the signal chain.
“We decided to start the project by investigating the preamps from tube echo units, so I bought an original Echoplex® EP-2 to begin the process”, said Gregg Stock, Strymon CEO and analog circuit guru. “It showed up in pristine condition and sounded amazing, and we found out later that it had been heavily modified by storied guitar tech Cesar Diaz. His mods created a single unit with the best attributes of both tube and solid-state Echoplexes, so we spent a bunch of time figuring out how to recreate its behavior.” Pete Celi, Strymon co-founder, and DSP maven said “It was so clean and mechanically stable that other nuances stood out more prominently -chief among them being some capstan-induced variations that help to widen the spectrum of the repeats. With the Mechanics control at around 1 pm, you get a hyper-authentic representation of that golden EP-2 unit, with a high-speed flutter that adds dimension to the echoes.”
EC-1 is available now directly from Strymon and from dealers worldwide for $279 US.
For more information, please visit strymon.net.
Win the complete Electro-Harmonix Pico Pedal Collection and transform your sound with pitch-shifting, reverb, delay, and more. Enter now for your chance to level up your pedalboard with these compact, tone-shaping powerhouses! Ends September 26, 2024
NYC DSP Pico Series
The Electro-Harmonix Pico pedal series offers a range of compact, powerful effects suitable for various musical styles. The Pico Pitch Fork provides pitch shifting, while the Pico Oceans 3-Verb delivers three versatile reverb modes. The Pico Canyon Echo offers lush delay effects, and the Pico Deep Freeze gives dynamic freeze and shimmer sounds. The Pico Attack Decay allows for vintage envelope control, and the Pico Triboro Bridge produces rich, harmonic tremolo. The Pico Rerun emulates the warm, nostalgic sound of lo-fi tape echo, while the Pico Platform is a compressor/limiter with precise control. Lastly, the Pico POG offers polyphonic octave generation, all in small, pedalboard-friendly sizes.
EHX Pico Attack Decay - Tape Reverse Simulator
Create volume swells and decays, both in Mono mode—one volume envelope for all notes you play—or in Poly mode where each note to has its own volume envelope creating cascading swell effects and leads with agile attack smoothing.
EHX Pico Canyon Echo – Digital Delay
Pristine digital delay featuring up to 3 seconds of delay, Filter control, and tap tempo with 3 tap division modes.
EHX Pico Deep Freeze – Sound Retainer
Classic EHX Freeze effect with added auto mode, glissando, individual DRY and EFFECT level controls, and adaptive layering.
EHX Pico Oceans 3 Verb – Multi-mode Reverb
Packed with 30 polyphonic pitch modes, latching/momentary functionality, and adjustable pitch bend sweep for whammy-style effects.
EHX Pico Platform – Studio-style Compressor
Studio-style compressor / limiter to precisely tune dynamics with adjustable attack and sustain, hard/soft knee compression curves, and blend knob for parallel compression magic.
EHX Pico POG – Polyphonic Octave Generator
World famous octave effect in a pico package featuring octave up and down plus new Tone knob with tilt-shift EQ, Low Pass, and High Pass filtering options.
EHX Pico Rerun - Tape Delay
Vintage-style tape delay sounds with adjustable saturation and flutter to achieve a variety of warm, crunchy, warbly delay tones.
EHX Pico Tribobo Bridge – OD/Dist/Fuzz
Bridging the worlds of overdrive, distortion, and fuzz in a sub-compact pico chassis with selectable input contouring eq, active EQ on OD and DIST, and LPF and Gate on Fuzz.
EHX Pico Pitch Fork – Polyphonic Pitch Shifter
Packed with 30 polyphonic pitch modes, latching/momentary functionality, and adjustable pitch bend sweep for whammy-style effects.
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
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.