TAPE ECHO

The first famous performer who used tape echo as far as I can determine was the excellent guitarist, Les Paul. Also Ken Griffin appears to be the first person to use tape echo with Hammond organs. The well-known Hammond artist Lenny Dee used this effect much more, to the point that in my not at all humble opinion, he greatly overdid it. Tape echo can be used as a novelty or special effect, but this should be done sparingly. The usual purpose of using tape echo would be to provide a little acoustical "ambience" to a recording that might not otherwise have any, or as a supplement to another type of ambience effect such as a spring reverb unit. Tape echo has the advantage of producing a very flat or even response and it also has excellent fidelity.

But to be truly effective, tape echo should be just a subtle background effect, and not usually a featureed special effect. Repeating echo has been and continues to be a useful effect for many types of popular music, adding a nice, snappy, bouncy effect to certain types of music. At certain speeds, it's possible to play in step with the echo, and then the repeat echoes add to the rhythm of the music being played. If a musician plays in step with the echo, then the number of repeats should be substantially limited to no more than three or four repeats. A long trail of repeat echoes, if one is playing in step with the echo, can quickly go from being a really neat effect to becoming an intrusion, just as allowing any repeat echo effect to appear on bass tones will usually result in a muddy effect, and depending on the echo repeat rate, it can also seriously spoil the rhythm of the music.

As we reduce the echo delay time, we can get away with more repeats. Like regular reverberation, a trail of echoes that becomes too long, however, will tend to blur the music. All of these various effects should be used sparingly to add a little extra special effect here and there. Like dessert, however, it's easy to use too much. I know that I certainly speak from experience when I mention that when I was a teenager and I first learned how to make tape echo and add it to my own playing, I drowned everything I played in a sea of echoes until an older and wiser musician informed me of my serious stylistic mistake. And of course he was right as I soon realized when I made my use of tape echo mainly a background effect and realized how much better this actually sounded. I find now that repeat echo should almost always be very subtle; a gentle background effect that does not intrude in any way upon the music. The only exception to that caveat is if you have the echo repeat rate set to match the tempo of the music so that the echo becomes a rhythm effect. In that situation, the echo can be made somewhat prominent but it should fade after just a few repeats.

The whole concept of tape echo is really based on using the tape to store a recording of a sound for a short time interval and then to play it back at a lower volume. Actually you can think of a recording of something on tape as just a long echo with a delay that might last hours, days or weeks from the time you made the recording to when you play it back. Tape echo does exactly that, but the playback in tape echo happens after a very short interval, usually much less than even 1 second. On a tape ceck that can produce echo, the playback head is usually placed about an inch after the recording head. So if the tape travels at fifteen inches per second, then after a sound gets recorded on the tape, it will be payed back in 1/15th of a second. We can get multiple repetitions by feeding the playback signal into the recording input of the machine, whereupon it will be played back again after another 1/15 of a second. The trick here of course is to reduce the volume of the playback signal so that when the repetition comes, it will not be as loud as the first or direct signal. In that way, every successive repeat echo will be quieter than the preceding so that generally, after perhaps 3 to 10 repetitions, it has decreased to inaudibility. If the repeat rate is fast, we can tolerate more individual repetitions than if the repeat rate is slower. A good rule to follow here is that whatever the repeat rate may be, after one second, the repetition volume is at zero.

There is one very interesting exception to this rule which I described on the previous page where we make the first repeat considerably louder than the first or direct signal. This is definitely a type of novelty effect, and it should be sparingly used and never overdone. If I were making a recording of fiteen songs, I might use this for just one verse of one song, but no more.

On the following page you'll find some sound clips, brief excerpts of songs that showcase various tape echo effects played on a Hammond B3.