DAN AGOSTO: Hi. Welcome to Gearwire.Com. We're taking a look at the Flip Tube Power Delay. This a Tokyo Sound product, the TDX Tube Echo, but here in the U.S. they're distributed by Guyatone, so let's take a look at what's inside the box.

Well, it's always nice to see that it comes with an adapter, and this one let's see. Output is 12 volts DC, 200 mA, and also the center is negative. Let's take a look. Actually, here's the pedal so that came out first. Let's take a look at the documentation we get. All right, this is just safety precaution. Nothing in here that's really that interesting but you definitely want to read it if you're not used to using stuff like this. Registration, send that in to Godlyke, and here we see the owner's manual.

Right here, we can see it's hybrid digital-analog delay, so it's a digital delay circuit it seems with some sort of tube preamp built in, custom-designed filter. Let's see. There's a warm organic tube tone so it’s a 12AX7 built inside. You can get delay from 20 ms up to 2,600 ms so 2.6 seconds long. It's pretty nice long delay. True bypass switch. So, there's all sorts of helpful information in here.

If we take a look at the pedal, there' a good amount of knobs on here. Right over here, we see the vents for the tube so you can actually see the tube. Here's our true bypass switch. We have a few different jacks on the top. First one over here is mix. You would just -- This is what you would use if you were just using one input and one output. We also have a dry output. If you needed the signal, if you wanted to mix the signal out to some other amp or to the PA, depending on what type of instrument you are using. There is our AC or DC input, and our 1/4" input.

Over on the top, back on the top we see the mix effect. This little control on how much the reverb is going to our mix output. We also have the feedback knob that controls how many echoes there are, our delay knob which will control the time between each delay or between the dry signal and the delay signal. Right here we have a tiny little switch. This also has to do with delay time. We have the short delay time, so we're very short here, and we are still pretty short but it's turned all the way up. But to get any longer, we need to go to medium, and to get longer than that we need to go to the long delay setting.

Down here, we get our saturation control. Both these knobs act kind of differently and we can check out and see what they actually do when we plug the pedal in and it's ready to go. So, that's the hybrid tube power flip tube echo out of the box.

We got our flip tube echo plugged in and ready to go. I'm playing the Epiphone Double Neck SG, and we're playing into the Fender Princeton Recording Amp. The recording out of that is going into the recorder. It's what you're hearing, probably the best way for us to get a sound on a tape that's not biased in any way by mic placement or anything like that. So, let's take a listen to our sound just clean without any of the pedal in it.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING GUITAR WITH THE TDX TUBE ECHO BYPASSED]

And so we have most of the knobs -- I have turned all of the knobs at midnight, and the switch here is set to the S. That's the shortest delay setting, so the time will be more of a slapback delay-type thing. So, I'm going to bring the pedal in, and one thing to keep in mind is when you power up this pedal for the first 20 seconds or so or maybe longer, you're not going to hear anything because it's a tube that's warming up inside. So, let's hear what our sound is like in the short setting and all its knobs turned up to midnight.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING GUITAR WITH THE TDX TUBE ECHO ENGAGED]

First thing, our mix effect is a little bit high, so I'm going to turn it more towards the dry side.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING GUITAR WITH THE TDX TUBE ECHO BYPASSED]

In certain settings, you may just want to -- if you have two amps or if you're recording anything, multiple inputs, you can take up the dry signal out of here, but we're just using the mix output so this is our knob, money knob right now.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING GUITAR WITH THE TDX TUBE ECHO ENGAGED]

Okay, so one thing we can do is we're going to have more feedback...

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING GUITAR WITH THE TDX TUBE ECHO ENGAGED]

...like so, so you can make it go pretty crazy.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING GUITAR WITH THE TDX TUBE ECHO ENGAGED]

That almost sounds -- It sounds a little bit like a spring reverb. We turn it down, it will be more of a subtle effect.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING GUITAR WITH THE TDX TUBE ECHO ENGAGED]

We probably can get away with turning on a little bit of our -- turn up a little bit our wet signal.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING GUITAR WITH THE TDX TUBE ECHO ENGAGED]

It kind of sounds like an early reflection in a reverb. Let's turn down our time all the way and see what happens.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING GUITAR WITH THE TDX TUBE ECHO ENGAGED]

We're actually getting, and we get this with most of like pedals, a sort of comb filtering effect.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING GUITAR WITH THE TDX TUBE ECHO ENGAGED]

We can turn it off.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING GUITAR WITH THE TDX TUBE ECHO BYPASSED]

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING GUITAR WITH THE TDX TUBE ECHO ENGAGED]

Now, if we were to modulate the time setting on this just slightly, we could get like a chorus effect, so let's turn this time up and see what we get.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING GUITAR WITH THE TDX TUBE ECHO ENGAGED]

Still pretty much as a slap back even at the highest setting. While we're here, let's check out the analog simulation tape knobs over here. I think these knobs they work together, so if we turn down the tape knob there...

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING GUITAR WITH THE TDX TUBE ECHO ENGAGED]

...as opposed to up...,

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING GUITAR WITH THE TDX TUBE ECHO ENGAGED]

...so it actually sounds like we're getting a bit of distortion. If we turn this knob all the way up...

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING GUITAR WITH THE TDX TUBE ECHO ENGAGED]

...it sort of heightens the effect. If we have this turned down...,

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING GUITAR WITH THE TDX TUBE ECHO ENGAGED]

...you don't hear much of anything. Even if we turn this up...,

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING GUITAR WITH THE TDX TUBE ECHO ENGAGED]

...the knob has less of an effect on it. So, let's turn the both of them all the way down, turn up our feedback...,

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING GUITAR WITH THE TDX TUBE ECHO ENGAGED]

...that's all the way down, you get a cooler sort of sound. If you turn it all the way up...,

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING GUITAR WITH THE TDX TUBE ECHO ENGAGED]

You can actually hear the distortion on the echoes, and that's applied only to the echoes, which is kind of cool. We can mess around with that. Let's move to our medium time setting. Turn it all the way down.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING GUITAR WITH THE TDX TUBE ECHO ENGAGED]

So there's some overlap. This is somewhere inside of the range of our short setting. Let's move it to the middle.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING GUITAR WITH THE TDX TUBE ECHO ENGAGED]

So, we're starting to get more of that classic delay effect.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING GUITAR WITH THE TDX TUBE ECHO ENGAGED]

All right. We can turn that all the way up and see how long we get.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING GUITAR WITH THE TDX TUBE ECHO ENGAGED]

Check out this analog simulation again.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING GUITAR WITH THE TDX TUBE ECHO ENGAGED]

All the way down and all the way up.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING GUITAR WITH THE TDX TUBE ECHO ENGAGED]

All right, back to midnight, and let's move to our long setting. I'm going to turn the time all the way down.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING GUITAR WITH THE TDX TUBE ECHO ENGAGED]

Yeah, we're seeing again some overlap in the ranges. Turn that to the middle...,

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING GUITAR WITH THE TDX TUBE ECHO ENGAGED]

...we're starting to get really long.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING GUITAR WITH THE TDX TUBE ECHO ENGAGED]

All right, and all the way up. This is going to be a very, very long delay. I'm just going to show you how long it is.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING GUITAR WITH THE TDX TUBE ECHO ENGAGED]

So, it's pretty long. On the setting over here, this long setting, if we turn up the feedback, we can sort of make it into a looper almost. It is very long a lot of times so we may want to mess with the time, and also because it's an analog delay effect there's kind of also weird things we can mess with you would hear in a lot of noise music, psychedelic delay core type stuff.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING GUITAR WITH THE TDX TUBE ECHO ENGAGED]

You know, when I have that going, I can move our delay time.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING GUITAR WITH THE TDX TUBE ECHO ENGAGED]

You may go really high or really low. You can go really high and start playing over that.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING GUITAR WITH THE TDX TUBE ECHO ENGAGED]

Bring down the feedback a little bit.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING GUITAR WITH THE TDX TUBE ECHO ENGAGED]

You can get really low as well.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING GUITAR WITH THE TDX TUBE ECHO ENGAGED]

While that's going, you can just play something else over it.

[DAN AGOSTO PLAYING GUITAR WITH THE TDX TUBE ECHO ENGAGED]

Now, that doesn't make much sense but it shows you some of the things that you can do with a pedal with this long of delay and is also pretty much just an analog sounding thing. So, thanks for checking out the Flip Tube Echo, and stay tuned for the sound video.