Jack White’s Third Man Hardware and Black Mountain have put their heads together on a compact delay pedal that is the size of your typical Boss pedal, and yet has an integrated roller wheel for controlling parameters on the fly.
The Roto-Echo really is an analogue delay like no other. Under the hood, a PT2399 echo/delay chip supplying warm gritty repeats.
There are three knobs: Time, Blend and Feedback, all quite straightforward, and yet, you come to this roller wheel, which leverages Black Mountain’s Freewheel tech to offer real-time control over the pedal’s parameters.
Just use the slider switch to choose which knob you want to control with the roller wheel (Delay/Feedback/Blend), and then you can adjust those parameters with your foot. The pedal is designed to take your full body weight.
How might this sound in practice? If the switch is set to Delay, and you are using the roller wheel to adjust delay time, you could be running the Roto-Echo at a slapback 30ms setting, just thickening up your sound – maybe for a little rockabilly action – then extend those repeats and max them out at circa 600ms, going all spaced-out during a solo, say... Or you could use it for sweeping delay time as you play, shifting the pitch of your repeats.
There are many possibilities. This looks like the sort of pedal you could lose a weekend to as you experiment with different settings – and the technique to work that roller wheel as you are playing, perhaps using it to control the Feedback and take your sound from the percussive thumb of single-digit repeats or dial in self-oscillating infinite repeats.
Adjusting the Blend control via the roller wheel could give you some nice ramping effects on the repeats as they become more pronounced in the mix.
We can take a guess at how this collaboration went down; we’d bet good money the circuit was all Third Man/Jack White, gritty, warm analogue delay, because it’s Black Mountain that specialises in these super-compact roller wheel pedals, offering a volume pedal that’s half the size your the normal treadle-style units.
Black Mountain’s other products include thumb picks, Asteroid picks and guitar slides. Apparently, Jack White has already used the Roto-Echo when recording No Name and it was on his touring pedalboard.
The Roto-Echo is true bypass. It takes 9V DC from a pedalboard power supply, and you can get it in black or limited edition yellow, direct from Third Man Hardware, Black Mountain and Reverb priced £216/$279.
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