I’ve been agonizing over delay pedals for a while, posted about it in first few days of the [email protected] community. To recap, I wanted a delay pedal with tap tempo and quick access to self-oscillation. I have a “stereo” chorus and tremolo, so once I had decided to find a new delay pedal I also decided it should support stereo.
With the Boss DM-101 and RE-202 as very strong contenders, with a few too many nitpicky limitations at their high price points, I picked up a Strymon El Capistan. It’s my first Strymon pedal. It’s replacing a Danelectro Dan-echo. The Dan-echo is good for the features it has, but it’s a very basic feature set. The Capistan adds stereo, tap tempo, multi-head tape (with controls to adjust distance between tape heads, tape age, and wow/flutter), self-oscillation, sound-on-sound mode, reverb, and support for external control via foot switch, expression pedal, or MIDI.
Not the cheapest option I considered but cheaper enough than the DM-101 and RE-202 with enough of the features I wanted.
Glad you were able to figure it out, sometimes you just gotta pull the trigger lol. It’s tough because there’s SO many good options and you get choice paralysis. Strymon is easily top 3 for delay and reverb IMO. I hear nothing but good things about El Cap.
Yeah once I accepted there wasn’t going to be a perfect choice it wasn’t tough to balance price and features. And indeed the Cap is sounding great.
Nice! Good choice!
The El Cap is one of my favorite delays. I went back and forth between it, a Way Huge Supa Puss, and the Chase Bliss Tonal Recall, and ultimately went with the TR.
Stuck with the TR until about a month ago, when I switched over to an Eventide H90 for most of my Non-Drive related effects, but I am thinking about getting another El Cap just for a small board to carry around to little jams.
Are you running a MIDI setup or anything?
I looked at the Supa Puss, but I really got into my own head about stereo since I already had two other stereo pedals. My main amp is an Orange Crush 35rt, and I have a Fender Frontman 10g that my wife bought to encourage me to get back into playing (and it worked, I bought the 35rt pretty soon after). The Frontman is just sitting there so I was going to set that up to check out the stereo, and maybe mono wet/dry. But it’s like the bottom end Frontman, so meh.
Don’t think I ever looked at the Tonal Recall. Holy Dip Switches Batman! Chase Bliss is pretty awesome though. Did you see the fake Automatone Delay render? 😄
I’m aware of the H90, but after having a Boss RC5 I know that menu-diving pedals aren’t for me. That was a primary reason I didn’t go with the much cheaper Boss DD-200.
I don’t have any MIDI controllers in my setup. I like the idea of having like a G3 along with MIDI pedals for programming for a set list, but I’m just an at-home noodler.
I hadn’t seen the CBA Delay mock-up, but I imagine it was wild. The PreAmp MKii is a killer drive pedal, but I like stacking drives, so I traded it towards an amp.
The menu-diving thing isn’t really the way I like to do things either, but I’m telling ya, if you get a chance to play around with the H90, you definitely should. It’s crazy how much you can do with it.
Oh man, I saw it over on TheGearPage, but the thread has been deleted! The post there said it was first on Reddit, but quickly deleted!
Ok I asked on TGP why it would have been deleted if it debunked the fake. Then when I went to check I thought it had been deleted, but it had simply been moved. And somebody still had the image, so here it is. Reportedly fake.
