There's a little bit of Cesar Diaz's magic in Strymon's new EC-1 Single Head dTape Echo. The late guitar tech was behind the tone of electric guitar players like Stevie Ray Vaughan, Eric Clapton and Keith Richards. Now his handiwork has played into the latest model to join Strymon's legendary line of effects pedals.
Creation of the EC-1 began when Strymon set out to devise a single-head tape echo pedal based on the award-winning dTape algorithm at the heart of their El Capistan stompbox.
Things took a turn, however, when Gregg Stock, Strymon CEO and analog circuit guru, attempted to kick off the project by studying the preamp of a vintage tube EP-2 Echoplex.
“We decided to start the project by investigating the preamps from tube echo units,” Stock says, “so I bought an original Echoplex EP-2 to begin the process. It showed up in pristine condition and sounded amazing.”
Stock soon learned the unit had been heavily modified by Diaz.
“His mods created a single unit with the best attributes of both tube and solid-state Echoplexes,” Stock explains, “so we spent a bunch of time figuring out how to re-create its behavior.”
Pete Celi, Strymon co-founder and DSP maven, says of the EP-2, “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.”
Strymon has packed their new know-how into the EC-1 Single Head dTape Echo pedal. In addition to offering two models of the EP-2’s tube preamp, with variable gain, the EC-1 has a three-position Record Level switch that allows for additional gain control. A glitchless tap tempo allows the user to set tempos without introducing tape artifacts, while Tape Age and Mechanics controls modify several under-the-hood parameters to produce authentic tape behavior at all settings.
Says Celi, “With the Mechanics control at around 1 p.m., you get a hyper-authentic representation of that golden EP-2 unit, with a high-speed flutter that adds dimension to the echoes.”
And because the EC-1 is a true stereo pedal, it has TRS stereo inputs and outputs and processes the left and right inputs independently, allowing the pedal to be placed anywhere in the signal chain.
Other features include full MIDI implementation, TRS MIDI, a rear-panel audio routing switch, USB-C and 300 presets.
The EC-1 is available now directly from Strymon and from dealers worldwide for $279 U.S.
For more information and sound samples, visit Strymon and the company’s YouTube channel.
The EC-1 joins a huge range of pedals created by Strymon, including the NightSky reverb, Iridium Amp and IR Cab pedal, and the Compadre Dual-Voice Compressor and Boost.
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