Echoe boxes with tap tempo feature

Bob-Dubery

You'll have to excuse me for asking these kinds of questions. I was out of the musical loop, and certainly the gear loop, for many years and missed out on all kinds of significant developments.

Like delay boxes with that nifty feature that allows you to match delay times with tempo by tapping on a button.

I'm wondering how long this feature has been available, and how players managed before.

These questions are prompted by some live John Martyn I've been listening too. Martyn used a lot of effects on acoustic guitar, and did so from the early 70s onwards. His use of effects is imaginative and very musical. And what has caught my ears is his use of echo effects. He started making significant use of such effects circa 1972 when he started using an Echoplex. And what I hear a lot of of is repeats that fit in very well with the tempo of the music.

Now I'm pretty sure that tap-tempo delay devices weren't available in 1972, or even in 1985 (I have been listening quite a lot to a live Martyn album recorded in 1985). So how did he get music and effect so well matched?

Possibilities that come to my mind are

1) Get the effect set up and do some preparatory noodling during which you adjust the tempo of the music to suit the effect
2) Play in time with a little flashing light on the box (but then what about the rhythm section, where do they get their cue from?)
3) Have a roadie tweak the effect once the tune has started
4) Make sure the audience is stoned.

On some of the earlier stuff you can hear that it's tape delays in use. You can hear the audio quality, and especially the tops, degrade on each repeat. I don't think this is "bad" or "worse", just different, and I think it has it's charms.

Gearhead

Can't answer that one directly but let's go back and find older products that had it.

Another important feature of a delay unit is to attenuate the delays while you're playing and to make them come out more when you're not. It's like having a compressor in the wet signal with the dry one in the side chain.
The TC Electronic G-Force has both, with the tap tempo also affecting chorus, vibrato etc. and was released 1998.

AlanRatcliffe

Now I'm pretty sure that tap-tempo delay devices weren't available in 1972, or even in 1985 (I have been listening quite a lot to a live Martyn album recorded in 1985). So how did he get music and effect so well matched?

It's down to learning to play in time - you figure out what the tempo is and set the delay time to a note value (16ths, eighths, etc) then play along in time to the delay. It's a skill you learn - pretty much like learning to play in time with a drummer. As with a drummer, you can also learn to push or pull the timing by playing slightly ahead or behind the beat.
I've worked with drummers that could play exact tempos without, but commonly pro drummers will use a click to keep the tempo - and once the tempo is set and delay times are set correctly, everything clicks into place ('scuse the pun).

toastyrat

I understand what you mean bob. Being someone myself who uses delay quite a lot, but only ever tap tempo or setting the bpm i also can't believe how the old school dudes set manual times so accurately. (In know some who still insist on it)

I guess you get good at it if you forced to. We live in a privileged time...

Werner-Carstens

I insisted on getting a delay with a tap tempo function (after using a BOSS DD-3 for ages) for 2 basic reasons:
1. accommodating the band speeding up or dragging the tempo (and this is not only the fault of the drummer)
2. Switching to different delay tempo's for different songs.
With the DD3 I used to memorise the tempo settings of each song as a starting point. By the end of the song it used to be slightly faster or slower than the tempo we started with but I could nothing about that.
For recordings it worked better as the drummer played with a click or the drums were programmed.
How they did it in the old days in a live environment is also a mystery to me.

AlanRatcliffe

How they did it in the old days in a live environment is also a mystery to me.

Musicianship...

Listening to what's going on around you on stage will get you most of the way there. Sadly it seems like a bit of a lost art these days. Ensemble music should be like a conversation, you listen to the other guy play then have your say and fit your "comments" around his. Most players these days seem to be the musical equivalent of the guy who doesn't listen to what the other fellow is saying because he's too busy thinking of what he's going to say next. Or he's the guy busy shouting, to drown out what everyone else is saying.