OWEN O'MALLEY: Welcome back to Gearwire.Com. This is part two of our look at the Akai Head Rush E2.

Now, I mentioned in the last video that this particular pedal, possibly what makes it the most unique in the world of delay and echo/looping pedals is the fact that it has five separate outputs, and there's even a schematic in the handbook -- handbook? -- the manual that shows this pedal running through five separate amps. So, I decide to hear what that would sound like. I've hooked up five amps to the five outputs on this pedal. We've got our Laney VC30, there's our VOX AC15, we’ve got a Bogner Alchemist 212 (awesome), our Fender Deluxe Python, and a little '59 Bassman reissue over there. Um, why am I talking? Let's play.

So now the only way that this five-output setup works is when it's in the tape echo mode. As you can see, our sot of dry signal or our main signal is going out the first output here that's going to the Laney, Head 1 is going to the AC15, Head 2 is going to the Bogner here, Head 3 is going to the Fender Deluxe, and Head 4 is going to the Fender Bassman. We do have sort of a hodgepodge of mics going on here. Anyway, let's just first hear our dry signal. When the pedal is off, you only get output out of the first output [OWEN STRUMS SINGLE CHORD] so you should only be hearing the Laney right now [OWEN PLAYS GUITAR WITH HEAD RUSH BYPASSED] and only in one side of the mix. I've sort of panned these guys progressively from right to left or left to right, depending on how you've got your speakers set up.

Now, you could see we've got our tap tempo going here. In this mode, all of the sort of like teal green control labels apply, so we've got our still our high-frequency dampening, we've got our feedback (those two are just the same as in normal delay mode). Time is now just a time -- time Coarse is now just a time control, and now on the bottom here, we add these two tape effects.

You can see we can still use tap tempo here, this tap tempo button to input our tempo.[ We can also use the time button now to change the tempo. Let's put it right in the middle here and let's turn our effect on.

[OWEN DEMONSTRATES TAPE DELAY MODE]

Now, we've got a little bit of the high dampening going on. We've definitely got some feedback going on. If we turn feedback off, we just get, I guess, one iteration per amp, and that's it.

[OWEN JAMS WITH TAPE DELAY MODE]

So, some pretty, pretty cool stuff going on. Now, if you want to calibrate all your amps to be the same level, you want to turn all your dials to the left. You want to have your high-frequency decay all the way to the left so that basically you're getting the same exact copy of your signal going to every single amp. You want to have feedback all the way to the left so you're not getting any trails. If you do have feedback, you get [OWEN DEMONSTRATES FEEDBACK]. You can hear we've still got repeats kind of going in all of the amps even after the initial repeat hits each amp. Alright, let's bring that back.

You also want to have Ratio all the way up to the left. Now, Ratio -- I don't know if you can see the graphic here -- but basically it cuts down the relative volume of each successive output. When it's all the way to the left, every output, at least the output anyway is at the same volume. Obviously, these amps have slight differences in their volume, there's different mics. Yeah, but we can kind of bring Ratio clockwise here a little bit [OWEN PLAYS WITH RATIO AT HIGH SETTING] and you can hear a little bit now the volume's kind of dropping off at every amp. [OWEN PLAYS WITH RATIO AT HIGHEST SETTING] And that is at it's most extreme right there. Now, let's just bring it back all the way to the left. Then we've got something here called Head Gap which moves the relative position of the third and fourth Head outputs. Right now, everything is sort of relatively equidistant if we’re thinking in terms of virtual tape heads, right? So, if we [OWEN PLAYS NOTE WITH HEAD GAP AT LOWEST SETTING], there's the same sort of like time output between each successive repeat. Now, if we put this in the middle here [OWEN PLAYS NOTE WITH HEAD GAP AT MID SETTING], we've got a little kind of wacky pattern going on [OWEN PLAYS NOTE WITH HEAD GAP AT LOW AND HIGH SETTING]. Now, actually what it sounds like going on is we've got -- well yeah, so not only is there more of a gap between two and three but one and two and three and four are also relatively closer together. So if we imagine -- get ready -- if we imagine our four tape heads like this, equidistant like this [OWEN FLASHES INDEX AND MIDDLE FINGERS OF BOTH HANDS], the more clockwise we get with head gap, the more they go like this [OWEN BRINGS INDEX AND MIDDLE FINGERS CLOSER TO ONE ANOTHER]. Yeah, so anyway.

Now, when we've got our effect bypassed here -- let's just bring these all even again -- if we've got our effect bypassed, remember we [OWEN PLAYS A NOTE] only have output out of the first output here. So, "How do we play through all five amps at once?" is the obvious question. We turn the effect on and turn the time dial all the way to the left [OWEN PLAYS GUITAR WITH ALL FIVE AMPS]. Yes! [OWEN PLAYS GUITAR WITH ALL FIVE AMPS AGAIN]. Now there's like a microscopic delay going on but it really doesn't matter. For all intents and purposes, we're playing through five amps simultaneously, and what better time than now that to thrown on the radial tone button.

[OWEN PUSHES ALL AMPS TO OVERDRIVE AND PLAYS VARIOUS RIFFS AND LICKS]

Yeah, that's pretty sweet. So that's the tape echo mode using the Akai Head Rush E2. You've been watching Gearwire.Com. Thank you very much.