MusicRadar Verdict
The flavour of tape echo without the hassle.
Pros
- +
Large variety of tones and applications. Excellent build.
Cons
- -
Price.
MusicRadar's got your back Our team of expert musicians and producers spends hours testing products to help you choose the best music-making gear for you. Find out more about how we test.
The Wampler Faux Tape Echo provides an all-analogue, un-messed-with dry signal path combined with digital delay note clarity that can be tweaked with analogue tone shaping plus (bypassable) modulation.
"Tape echo can be a perfect fit with guitar and this will give you similar sound in a much more convenient way"
With the modulation bypassed, you get a nicely voiced delay varying from a quick slap through to the more spacey 800ms maximum delay - all governed by standard level, repeats (regeneration) and echo (delay time) knobs and the practical Shade control, an EQ that dulls the repeats to sit snugly in with your sound.
Modulation (the Faux Tape Reel) takes the form of the Movement and Sway knobs, which offer plenty of variations on chorused delay sounds and recreate some of the flavour of analogue tape, albeit less random in its variations.
Tape echo can be a perfect fit with guitar and this will give you similar sound in a much more convenient way. There's a tap tempo option, too - you wouldn't get that on a tape echo!
“A synthesizer that is both easy to use and fun to play whilst maintaining a decent degree of programming depth and flexibility”: PWM Mantis review
“I feel like that song had everything we needed to come back with”: Bring Me The Horizon’s Lee Malia on Shadow Moses, its riff and the secrets behind its tone, and why it was the right anthem at the right time
“I said, ‘Are we sure we can write a song about death?’”: The story of Mike + The Mechanics' classic No.1 The Living Years
