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July 31, 2015 at 5:53 am #84039Steve RapettiMember
To The Awesome Mr Mike Matthews and the EH Design Team:
As far as I can tell absolutely no one, ironically not even EH, has ever been able to reproduce an echo device that allows True Reverse On Demand.
The closest anyone can get to it negates the inherent perfection of your original 16 Second Delay. No one has been able to reproduce or top that old collectible gem as a result. Perfection was achieved and abandoned at that point as far as a lot of players are concerned, but you had to either Be There or Own One to even know what perfection is.
Why?
Especially now, when we’d expect ANYTHING could be programmed to happen? Why no True Reverse On Demand?
This makes absolutely no sense to me at all.
The ability to reverse a recording at the touch of ONE BUTTON is Absolutely Critical to maintaining the accuracy of a phrase, in time with a beat, especially on the fly in a live performance when a performer has to think about playing, not punching multiple buttons. We also want to keep playing and have the notes played over the reversed phrase also recorded, so even they can be flipped. There is NO device on the market that can do Instant True Reverse, and certainly no other way to also be able to continue playing while having that playing be recorded while the previous plays backwards until you punch back and flip them both again, intuitively in time with a performance.
No. nothing else has ever been able to do it. Instead, we get the semi interesting garbled mishmash of pseudo reverse sample and spurt sputtering out in bits you can’t plan or anticipate type of “reverse”, or you have to grab and punt… finish a recording of a section, stop, turn around, and let it go, no more fun to be had until it’s tiresome and you have to start fresh with a new loop. No inherent freedom to fly.
WHY?
It SUCKS knowing that at some point my treasured old clunky broken knobbed but PERFECT old 16 Second Delay is going to croak, and there is NOTHING that can even begin to approach the intuitive perfection of that singularly awesome idea Mike Matthews realized so many long years ago… True Reverse On Demand… one switch and DONE.
Mike is my favorite inventor, and a True American HERO who had the balls to walk the gauntlet of union goons who tried to keep him from running his own company, and then made working impossible. He saw his brainchild abducted and murdered in front of his eyes, I read the story, I know. He endured, came back and RULES the pedal market, just as he should. I love everything he’s done.
I also literally pray to God Mike and his Design Team make the decision to tackle doing this one thing, one more time. Please…
I created a new rocker pedal design of my own to tie in to the Reverse Switch and the main echo tap slider, so when I rock the pedal up and down it selects the taps, which are perfect divisions of whatever tempo the master delay slider was set for, and I added a microswitch to the underside of the rocker pedal, under the rubber just right, so all I have to do is add a slight bit of pressure to the heel of the pedal to get Forward/Reverse effects. Perfection.
EH should try it. It would be the Last Echo Pedal Anyone Would Ever Have To Build… and the only delay pedal anyone would ever want once they played it. This is no idle boast. People have had religious experiences on mine for decades. THAT MEANS SOMETHING when everyone wants one.
Why can’t it be you? One more time?
Why not, Mike?
Sincerely, your long time fan Steve Rapetti
July 31, 2015 at 1:13 pm #120822Fender&EHX4everModeratorSo the reissue 16secDD can’t do it? The foot controller has a reverse switch.
What about the new 22500?August 1, 2015 at 7:57 am #120823Steve RapettiMemberSadly, the Reissue EH16DD is a pale shadow of it’s original namesake, and doesn’t provide one touch Forward/Reverse. It may look like it, but it’s a COMPLETELY different breed of horse.
As for the newest 22500, we have the same problem, what I’d call a second category Reverse. The first being the kind of sample & Hold arbitrary and unpredictable mishmash of grabbed sample bits that have been tossed off backwards without representing an accurate reverse copy of a recording. The Second type is the reverse that requires you to record a loop before you can get creative with it. Until you play with a True Reverse On Demand with layering capability, you’re just missing the bus with what made the original EH16DD a magical thing.
Today I had the honor of hearing from Mike Matthews, my hero. He said this…
Steve
Thank you very much for caring enough about this particular feature…to inform us of what YOU need.
I will present this to our engineers and see when we might incorporate it
Rock & Roll,
Mike MatthewsYou can’t even imagine my surprise when I got this followup later in the afternoon from Mike…
The 22500 allows for “Reverse on demand”.
I just about went in to shock. Then I read the Manual, and Houston, we have a Big Problem. Right now everything hinges on their use of the word “EXCEPT” in describing the Reverse Function in the Manual.
Understand something. I am NOT calling anyone at EH, ESPECIALLY Mike “wrong”. If anything, if there has been a misunderstanding it’s probably my fault. I may not have made my point accurately enough to be understood. With that in mind, I sent this rather more lengthy rant back to them. Hey this is technical stuff, and it’s hard to talk about processes that are second nature to my work habits and expectations which are entirely built up around a 35 year old product I STILL feel is better than anything ever made BEFORE or SINCE, and I feel sorry for anyone who will never get the chance to play the Original EH16DD. There is a better than average chance you’ll never know what I’m actually talking about. You need to stretch those cells around this concept to even begin to Understand what I take for granted. So lets try again…
Here is what I said to EH and Mike in response to the claim the 22500 allows “Reverse On Demand”,verbatim in the next panel because it didn’t quite fit here…
August 1, 2015 at 8:12 am #120824Steve RapettiMemberHi Mike.
First, thanks so much for your response. I can only wish the best to you and your team. You changed my life.
Now I want to change yours. I really want you to understand something fantastic was lost. Unfortunately, it has not been regained in this latest pedal if your manual is to be believed.
I wish it were true, what you said about having “Reverse On Demand” but I think we have a misunderstanding, and if we do, I need to explain myself better. The last think I will ever do is tell Mike Matthews he is Wrong. I blame myself for failing to get my point across.
The Manual says, “Reverse can be used any time except when recording an initial loop.”
That “except” kills Rev On Demand. It forces a stop, and kills the recording process, and kills the live layering process, the layering over reverse process, and the ability to instantly flip to reverse and keep recording process if this is true. Follow me? If you can’t go to reverse and keep recording, and then flip that at will and keep going, at will, and to the full length of the available loop length, you’re dead in the water compared to the original EH16 DD, and that’s a fact. It’s a functional fact I can’t do without now in my creative process.
In other words, it’s the same old problem I mentioned in my initial submission… the second of the two kinds of “Reverse” available EVERYWHERE today, that is completely unlike the perfect intuitive application of Reverse in the original EH 16 Second Digital Delay. So NO, it isn’t “Reverse On Demand”. It’s Sample and Hold and Reverse On Demand. The ability to change to reverse and still overdub, the ability to work as intuitively as tapping your toes to a beat is LOST. There is no way to simply tap the reverse in time to a beat, and have it reverse from that point so it keeps time synched in the same lock step. To sync, you HAVE to be able to go instantly in to reverse from the specific point you hit the switch, PERIOD.
Here’s another way to describe it. A simpler way. Think about a snare beat, hitting a simple 4 beat phrase. In a studio, to sync a reverse snare you’d have to record it and shimmy the sample in reverse and then match it to the snare strike. On the original EH16 Second DD, all I’d have to do is pass the beat through the pedal, hit 4 beats and on 5 (or 1), hit Reverse and the loop would pick up exactly in sync, in fact if I kept playing that 4 stroke beat and lifted or pushed the Forward Reverse switch every 1 count, the reverse would continually sync to the played beat. THAT is a musically efficient and intuitive way to play to any beat, because as long as you don’t run out of loop time, you’re creating loops on the fly that are perfectly in sync to ANY shift in tempo. You don’t have to fiddle with a thing. Just tap your toe in time… and everything else syncs.
You guys don’t get it, because you haven’t done it lately, if at all. Do you even have an old EH16 sitting around to play with? You don’t know what I’m talking about. It’s really weird because you already did this once and got it PERFECT what, 35 years ago now or thereabouts? I feel like I’m in the Twilight Zone.
Know what freedom is? Playing with a single little slapback echo, and then I kick down my home made sweeping (like a wa-wa) Echo Tap Pedal tied in with the EH16 Taps Slider, and I instantly have any musically spaced multiple of the original slapback length, so then I can go long, and start playing leads. At that point I don’t have to wonder if my pedal is timed to my music, because all I have to do is play 4 bars of lead, so maybe the available 16 seconds only goes out to 9 seconds actually recorded… doesn’t matter. I play and at the end of the phrase I hit the reverse, and the loop length is set in sync with the entire section, which I can now play double leads to, in time. At the end of 4 bars of dual leads, I hit the forward again and now I’m playing against my dual leads but this time the original line has flipped from reverse to normal and the second phrase has flipped to reverse and the new counter lead is happening, so it really sounds like three people playing something completely different again, synched together as I add the third lead. Then I can let the loop just keep going and play a counterpoint to the last phrase, maybe even chords against a repeating lead line because it’s only playing the last recorded line one time now. Then I kick my Tap Pedal back to a fast slapback and I’ve got that slick Jeff Beck style Strat twang of a slapback again. And all I had to do was play and tap my toe for Forward Reverse 3 times. Are you feeling it yet?
What is sad here is that EVERYONE is making “Looping Pedals” that do this tiresome thing of having to Record something before you can get creative with it. It’s counter-intuitive and tiresome and unpredictable. After getting spoiled on the EH 16, it’s just Bullshit, and don’t get mad at me for saying it, YOU are the ones who spoiled me to every other pedal ever made, and I will never hold THAT against YOU. Another sad thing is that a Looping Pedal could also be a decent enough Echo Pedal or Flanger while we’re at it. But again, no, they aren’t.
The EH 16 was.
Imagine that.
Sorry, but my reaction to everything that comes out that can’t even begin to match up to the functionality and quality of the product YOU MADE 35 YEARS AGO is….. sorry, but I’ve seen better. And that doesn’t work for me.
I’m still waiting for the next EH16DD, from you… and I sure don’t mean that reissue that never lived up to it either.
You need to take a longer look at what you had. Re-familiarize yourself with it, and realize what we lost there. It’s priceless. Well… that’s not exactly true because people are paying 3 Grand for the privilege now.
Doesn’t that mean anything to you?
You should care enough to see what I did with mine, and make something like this now. It’s a unique, logical evolutionary step up.
You really should. I dare ya.
Thanks,
Steve Rapetti
August 1, 2015 at 12:31 pm #120825Fender&EHX4everModeratorI would recommend recording a video demonstration of what it is you are doing with the original 16SecDD. Sometimes text just doesn’t do justice.
December 9, 2015 at 9:47 pm #121082starscapeMemberHi there,
to bring back the ORIGINAL 16sec Delay would be really, really great!
I never owned one but I’ve heard what people do or did with it (…like Robert Fripp, Adrian Belew, Bill Frisell, Nels Cline).
It truly stands out as an original in the line of looping devices for what it was both capable and uncapable of and it certainly had the genuine “EHX-slightly-over-the-top” twist which made it unique and lovable.As I posted somewhere else, I do livelooping already for a quite long time and I’ve owned many
loop boxes over the years, both stomp and 19″. I’ve recently bought a 22500 and I like it for what it does
and for it being already out of the baby shoes when it hit the light of day.But the Original 16sec Delay with all of it’s hands-on features and lo-fi charme is a completely different animal with another set of sonic goodies.
I would really love to own one and I wouldn’t care if it was big box or small box, faders or knobs, as long as it does what the old one did!Are those chips that were used in it still available? – If yes, please go ahead and indulge us!
Cheers
January 20, 2018 at 4:39 pm #123508info@andybutler.comMemberIs this it?
Loop starts playing back reversed as soon as you finish record?
The Gibson Digital Echoplex Pro would, I think, do *any* of the stuff you’re asking, including that.
If you can find one.
EH, *could* in theory do what no other company seems to, and actual do research on the various loop pedals/units that are out there, the features they have, and how people use/need those features.
(and how crabby the experienced loop guys get when the latest “most powerful” offering has what to them are no-brainer faults). -
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