Hi 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