[GREG CURVEY PLAYING GUITAR THROUGH A MAESTRO ECHOPLEX]

GREG CURVEY: The Echoplex tape delay. I love this thing. I love it so much I bought two of them. Tape delays, the difference between a tape delay is you can modulate it as you’re playing meaning...

[GREG CURVEY PLAYING GUITAR THROUGH A MAESTRO ECHOPLEX]

...you can affect the sound.

[GREG CURVEY PLAYING GUITAR THROUGH A MAESTRO ECHOPLEX]

You know, Jimmy Page, you see old videos of Jimmy Page doing that during “A Whole Lotta Love” and things like that or, you know, Robert Plant sings through with one and some videos.

[GREG CURVEY PLAYING GUITAR THROUGH A MAESTRO ECHOPLEX]

The tape delay, in comparison with the digital delay is digital is clean. The tape delay, the sound, the saturation of the tape as it keeps going through gets a little more dirty and is -- it just has a better, I think, a better sound. It depends of what you’re going for but that’s what a tape delay is going to give you. I’m sure they’ve probably come up with some digital version of that by now as well, but this has another cool feature. You can play on top of the sound. Now, it’s going to depend on how much tape is in here that’s going to give you the length of time you can play before it’s going to play back and you can play on top of it. I’ve probably got a couple of minutes of tape in here, so let’s just -- It’s going to play back what I’ve already done.

[GREG CURVEY PLAYING GUITAR THROUGH A MAESTRO ECHOPLEX]

You can play along with it right? So what happens is that’ll come around and then you’ll hear both of those things. What it’s nice for -- What it’s really nice for is doing things like Robert Fripp and Frippertronics and getting a nice loop of sound and then using your volume knob and coming in on top of it, you can get really cool things, very cool spatial, nice effects that way.

[GREG CURVEY PLAYING GUITAR THROUGH A MAESTRO ECHOPLEX]

As it comes around, what happens is is every time the tape comes through, it rerecords itself, right? So it’s rerecording what it’s playing back, and as it continually records and plays back, the sound becomes more deteriorated. That’s what I meant. The tape doesn’t deteriorate. It’s the sound quality deteriorates, and as it keeps playing, it just gets more kind of distorted and it kind of fades away really naturally, and there’s a very cool -- It sounds natural. It’s more natural. It’s a very nice sound.

I’m not exactly sure if it’s two record heads and one playback head or one record head and two playback heads. I’m not exactly sure how the thing works. I know that when you have this playback head right next to the record head, it gives you a short burst, right?

[GREG CURVEY PLAYING GUITAR THROUGH A MAESTRO ECHOPLEX]

There’s a slap-back, right? You move the head, the playback head, I think it is farther away...,

[GREG CURVEY PLAYING GUITAR THROUGH A MAESTRO ECHOPLEX]

...all the way.

[GREG CURVEY PLAYING GUITAR THROUGH A MAESTRO ECHOPLEX]

So, that’s the longest delay you’re going to get. You can’t get a two-second delay or something out of it, but as it records that, it records what you’re playing. So, if you put it on the sound-on-sound play...

[GREG CURVEY SWITCHING ON SOUND-ON-SOUND PLAY ON THE MAESTRO ECHOPLEX]

...once again, it’s going to play back everything you’ve been playing, and then you can play along to it on top of it. It’s like an eight-track tape player, right? It’s just a continual loop, and the tape comes out and goes through and back or I can’t -- I don’t even know which way it goes right now but as far as maintenance, you just have to keep it clean.

Quarter-inch tape, yeah. As long as you have the canister, the cartridge, this pops off. You can pop off the top, the wheels come out. You just put whatever length of tape you want in there. So, you could cut it down to a really short. You can cut it down to something really short or you can make it as long and as much tape that you can fit in there, right?

[GREG CURVEY PLAYING GUITAR THROUGH A MAESTRO ECHOPLEX]