If you’ve ever chased the warm, warbly magic of a vintage tape echo but didn’t want to deal with the maintenance, weight, or skyrocketing price of an old Echoplex, Strymon has just the thing. Enter the new EC-1, a no-nonsense, single-head tape echo pedal that delivers the lush repeats, coveted smooth preamp drive, and unpredictability of an original unit from the ‘60s – all in a pedalboard-friendly enclosure.
Packing Strymon’s renowned analog-inspired DSP wizardry, the EC-1 takes the core tone of their beloved El Capistan and distills it into a more streamlined, gig-ready package. As you’d expect, you get a tube-modeled preamp with selectable voicings, which has enough built-in saturation to take your echoes from clean and glassy to dark and smeared. You also gain deep control over the tape age, with the ability to dial in pristine repeats only possible with fresh tape to charactiful dark echoes that are a result of a degraded tape.
