Catalinbread Belle Epoch Tape Echo

The Catalinbread Belle Epoch Tape Echo Guitar Effects Pedal is a tape echo guitar effects pedal, which is a reproduction of the EP-3 Echoplex pedal, featuring 80 to 800ms delay time. The Echoplex was not necessarily “hi-fi”. As the echoes repeated, the signal got progressively degraded, losing low end and gaining a shiny, percussive top end with a bit of grit. The first repeat is strong and then it gets more and more diffused as it repeats. And in a well-tuned unit, you could dial in the repeats “Echo Sustain” so that it would float almost indefinitely, or cross the threshold to self-oscillation. There’s a control on the EP-3 that sets how hard the tape gets hit. While this control was ostensibly used to optimize signal-to-noise ratio, set low it would give light and airy repeats and set high it would saturate the tape hard and give an awesome fat and grungy repeat tone. Catalinbread designed the Belle Epoch’s modulation control to simulate the daily mechanical irregularities inherent in original Echoplex units. This would typically include bumpy capstan wheels, uneven tape tension, uneven motor speed, humidity, and actual ghosts? The original unit had a unique quality that when moving the delay time slider it took a moment to catch up to the adjustment, creating a doppler like effect. The Belle Epoch reproduces this behaviour while you turn the echo delay knob.