With so many new effects with so many functions and big learning curves, it’s nice to come across an older pedal that has a couple simple knobs and sounds just fantastic, without having a bunch of bells and whistles. Today’s featured pedal, the FX96 Echo FX Analog Delay from DOD was produced way back in the ancient year of 1997, and was billed as a modern improvement on classic tape echo machines like the Binson Echorec and Maestro Echolplex. Now, while that is a fairly bold and almost impossible claim for a pedal to make, it really isn’t that far off. Plus, it made for an easy-to-transport alternative to those previous machines, which were heavy and bulky, and require a lot of attention and maintenance.
The Dry/Tape control is your basic blend knob, allowing for as much or as little of the delay effect to come through in your overall tone. Echo controls the actual delay time, with a nice range going up to 800ms, pretty high for an analog delay, and one of the selling points for the FX96 when it was introduced. The Slap knob is your repeats control, which will get you one repeat or a whole bunch, depending on how intense you want the echoes to be. Finally, Tape Quality lets you really open up the delay’s analog voicing, acting like a low-pass filter to add in the grainy, muddy, darker sounds of those vintage echo units.
The production of the FX96 Echo FX Analog Delay was stopped in late 1999, after going through a cosmetic change, along with a few internal restructurings, and a new Chinese location of production. Today’s version is one of the earliest, and supposedly the better of the two (but who knows, really?). In any case, it sounds really, really good, and can be found for very decent prices – if nothing else, hundreds and hundreds less than an Echoplex or Echorec. If you come across one, check it out, it may just add a whole new way of thinking to your rig and your playing.
Submitted by Mike B, Website
Demo Rock pedalboard by West Coast Pedalboard
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August 2, 2017
I have the Mk. II version of this pedal which has the 800 ms maximum delay time. Purchased in 1998, it is superior to the Mk. I which has a considerably shorter max delay time. The only other difference, aside from some slightly different graphics on the pedal itself, is that the ‘Echo’ and ‘Slap’ knobs on the Mk. I are marked as ‘Delay Time’ and ‘Regen/Repeat’ on the newer model. The Mk. II version of this pedal is knobs & plugs (head & shoulders) ahead of similarly styled pedals and is well worth the effort to find.