Origanal Space Echo Machine from the 70s

[Sir Taffsalot]

My mate went and bought an original Space Echo machine from the 70s. Here's a video of me playing my Les Paul through it. How awesome does the guitar sound? We took the top off the Space Echo so we could film the tape moving about as it was working. Yes it uses tape! It's proper old school.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pyDhibvya2Y&feature=youtu.be

[ERH+]

What this magnetic tape is doing and why its not rolled up on spool?

[Sir Taffsalot]

My friend Simon and I have no idea. I was wondering that myself.

[Sir Taffsalot]

What this magnetic tape is doing and why its not rolled up on spool?

I assume the metal bit above the tape is magnetic and causes the tape to react in a wave live fashion to create that choppy wavy effect that the Space Echo machines does so well. Old school vintage machines for the motherfucking win! I don't want to take the cover off machines and see static circuit boards. I want to see cogs and tapes moving about!

[stumpy]

its probably a feedback loop, being on a spool wouldn't be possible. continuous tape with no end would play back some of what it had previously recorded with a time delay. I guess the time delay can be altered so you could possibly have a guitar battle against yourself.

[esme]

What this magnetic tape is doing and why its not rolled up on spool?

 

It's a continuous loop of tape, essentially a very long delay, if it went on to a spool then at some point the spool would fill & need rewinding, having a loop of tape means you can operate continuously without worrying about that.

 

The signal from the guitar gets recorded on to the tape, playback heads read back the signal, attenuate it, mix it back with the current signal & re record it to the tape.

 

This mixed signal is also fed to the output so you get an incredible layered, stretched guitar sound which sounds like multiple guitars playing in perfect synch.

 

You should be able to vary the speed of the tape or vary the attenuation to change the effect, you should be able to produce an effect like the one Brian May uses when he plays a sequence, a machine plays it back to him & he syncs with it, "Keep Yourself Alive" is a good example.

 

The tape bunches up like that because it's got to go somewhere, and it's this or have a machine several feet long which isn't very convenient, it could be threaded through reels which would add to the expense & increase the risk of breaking through wear or if you alter the tape speed, or the tape could be shorter but not by a lot as this would affect the maximum speed of the tape.

 

The tape will eventually wear out & break, but it's relatively easy to replace providing you can find a source of magnetic tape & a splicing kit to make a continuous loop of it.

 

In very early computer systems when RAM was a scarce and expensive resource & disk drives were the size of washing machines & had kilobyte capacities, a similar system was used on reel to reel tape drives.

 

The reels were big and heavy so they were slow to react when you wanted to read or write information quickly, they had a long latency and if you tried to move them rapidly & change direction, the motors wore out really fast, these things were very expensive, and the tape would also snap during rapid reversals, a lot.

 

So the tape would be fed into two boxes either side of the read write heads before being fed to the reels. The reels would then be used for bulk positioning of the tape and several feet of tape would fed into the boxes and be allowed to concertina up, the read write heads had small fast drive motors either side which could then rapidly feed the tape back & forth between the boxes without having to move the reels.

 

And because the RW head motors were only moving a small amount of tape rather than a big reel weighing a couple of pounds they didn't wear out as quickly

 

 

This image has that sort of system, the two columns are acting as a tape store so you don't have to move the reels, plus it soaks up any rapid direction changes without snapping the tape.

 

The box on the space echo machine where the tape is concertina'd up neatly is a variation on that to store the tape

Edited November 16, 2016 by esme