It's always good to see five items on Ebay, all listed as 'rare'. The RE-201 space echo isn't rare. They sell for £250-£300, but at the moment there are two on Ebay UK, both under £150 - this one has only a day to go. I've wanted one for as long as I can remember, probably because they always seem to pop up in the background wherever there are cool people. The Clash probably used them a lot. And Lee Scratch Perry must have half a dozen. (But remember: They can't make everyone look cool.) They look especially good balanced on top of a guitar amp. It's not really the sound - my PodXT can do that - it's the look of the battered green box and the assumption that it will make brilliant noises. I know if I bought one, I'd use it once, then it would sit under the desk, mocking me for believing an old Japanese box could make me cool like The Clash. Anyway, there's always one thing cooler, and in this case, it's the Korg SE-500 - the tape echo which matches your MS-20 synth and SQ-10 sequencer.
p.s. If you've got a RE-201 that's mocking you, and you enjoy the blog, you could always...
The Space Echo's really are that cool, but you have to be a bit cool yourself. It's like the Force - if you use you're echo powers for good, dub heaven, for evil, Pink Floyd.
ReplyDeleteI own both a RE-201 and a Korg SE-300, and I must say that the Korg whoops Rolands ass bigtime. The fidelity is better (but in that still-dirty-dubby way), the features are better, the spring reverb for instance, and.. well, it looks cooler!
ReplyDeleteI just scored a 201 off my piano teacher! 300 bucks canadian seemed like a pretty good deal.
ReplyDelete"the features are better, the spring reverb for instance..." Last time I checked the Re-201 has spring reverb
ReplyDeleteI played with a RE201 identical to the one pictured in a second hand store about 12 years ago. They wanted an obscene amount of money for it. I thought at the time that it was a crazy amount of money (they were asking $300) for a box with cheesy looking knobs on it. then I plugged a Gibson es335 into it, and it blew my mind. Playing with the time domain knobs while leaving a power chord playing through it was incredibly trippy. I've always regretted not picking it up, because somebody picked it up right after I left to go to the bank!
ReplyDeleteThe RE-201 is the Tr-808 of effect boxes. Nuff said...
ReplyDeleteI used to have a space echo, got one when they were new in the 80's. Eventually it got stolen and I bought a digital delay (the MXR). NO comparison. DDLs are way too perfect: the space echo's tape slips, giving you a nice random chorus effect, and the fidelity being less than perfect means the later echos are more deteriorated. As the tape gets older the effect is even better! I now have a space echo agin, which I use on keyboards. It is a very playable effect.
ReplyDeleteI have a owned a Korg Stage Echo and been exposed to many Space Echos, and I also own a Solid State Echoplex.
ReplyDeleteyou want fidelity go Echoplex.
Cool tripped out spaciness==Multivox Multiecho
It has singular and plural sound on sound modes for abstract ambient looping, spring reverb, and onboard mic mixer (granted its Hi-Z), and a circuit to provide feedback from the echo BACK into the reverb ("Swell" reverb) that is carefully calibrated to wreak havoc if you have to much, and just be lo fi if you don't. You can't TOUCH a Multiecho. I am glad they are so damned lo fi, so drum machine goobers don't start driving up the prices. Thank god most of them are broken and I have a secret cache of spare parts!
hear it at http://www.frognet.net/~absent/understellar%20innerstealer.mp3
i dont know one thing wich is wrong with the internet and blogging is people can write articles about something like a space echo that dont know anything about music or a space echo.
ReplyDeleteplease all of you pink floyd haters out there give me a break.
yeah they are cool,no a pod xt wont sound like one. please that just makes you sound dumb
The beauty of the Floyd haters is that David Gilmour uses the high rolling, high class, high society Binson Echorec ll, which operates more like a hard drive as opposed to using tape to deliver that other wordly echo. David Gilmour owns; deal with it.
ReplyDelete